


Drama Queen: A Story of Life, Love, and High School Theater

by crazycoffeegirl



Category: Musicals - Fandom, Original Work, Theater - Fandom
Genre: 96000, Allderdice, Complete, Gen, High School, In the Heights - Freeform, La Vie Boheme, Musicals, Phantom of the Opera - Freeform, Playlist, Theater - Freeform, Theatre, When You're Home, rent - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-16
Updated: 2013-09-10
Packaged: 2017-12-20 09:17:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 67,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/885578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crazycoffeegirl/pseuds/crazycoffeegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If high school is hell, then Allderdice is somewhere in the ninth circle, but Cassandra Hathaway is getting through, surviving her senior year by giving all her time to the school musical. She's always known this was what she was destined to do.</p><p>But life in the theater is never simple; new kids and old equipment, best friends and worst enemies, and far more coffee than is probably healthy. 180 days are all that stands between Cassie and her graduation, and it seems like putting together a musical is the very least of her worries.</p><p>Chapter 9: The Playlist to keep open and follow along with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. PROLOGUE

**Author's Note:**

> So my senior year, I was given an assignment to write 50 pages of anything of my choice; a year later, "Drama Queen" was several hundred pages long. Of course I'd love to try and publish it, but as you'll see there's quite a lot of musical lyrics used explicitly. So I still wanted to share it, and I hope you'll all read and enjoy!

Let me be frank with you:

Taylor Allderdice High School is a hellhole designed by a sick, sadistic asshole and controlled by a malicious ass-hat of a superintendent.

I honestly wish I were saying that just to get your attention.  
Unfortunately, it’s true. Imagine if you will, a building made simply for getting freshmen and parents, and even student teachers, lost in a maze of hallways and stairs leading everywhere and nowhere. There’s the fifth floor that most people believe to be a myth, but several people have found through a spiral staircase in a janitor’s closet on the fourth floor, only opened after school hours. There’s a second half to the first floor, known as the annex, which is accessible only via stairs, due to the fact the boiler room separates it from the first floor main. Only one set of stairs leads to the second floor annex, thanks to the library occupying the space that should be the rest of the hallway. And of course, the third floor main has a section sealed off to all humans, because what used to be a cafeteria seems to have become a cesspool for the disgusting bugs called ‘silverfish’ and nauseating thousand-legers that creep around the school and scare the shit out of you when you happen upon one.

Supposedly, we’re one of the best academic schools in the City of Pittsburgh, but anyone who actually goes here will deny that to the best of their abilities. CAS/AP classes are supposed to be the most difficult classes there are, but turn out to be relatively simple if you know what you’re doing. PSP, the second level of difficulty, is filled with people who just want to look smart; dealing with these people is what makes the classes annoying. Finally, the mainstream courses are the easiest you’ll find anywhere, as long as you can deal with the ungodly loud and hopelessly stupid people surrounding you.

Then you get the teachers; trust me, Lucifer has nothing on half of them. Usually you’re going to be fine, as long as you avoid the dragon that lives on the third floor and terrorizes the pre-engineering department. Some of them have been here for so long that they taught the students who later became their co-workers. The curriculum they have been forced to teach makes them grouchy, which they take out on their students, which makes us grumpy for the rest of the day.

We’re not even named after anyone important. Taylor Allderdice was a Pittsburgh guy who owned a plastic tubing company. I hope that goes to show you just how important you have to be to have a school named after you.

To sum it up, Taylor Allderdice is the closest thing you’ll find to hell on Earth.

And I am in hell.

I suppose an introduction is in order. My name is Cassandra, but those who know me call me Cassie. My name is from the prophetess in the Greek tragedy, Agamemnon, which in turn came from a character in a Greek myth. My mom is a total bookworm and decided many years ago to name her children after a character in whatever play she was reading when they were born. Trust me when I say, I got off easy; I have two brothers named Horatio (because of Hamlet) and Leonato (who has to go by ‘Leo’, thanks to Much Ado About Nothing) and a sister named Antigone (the unfortunate result of, well, Antigone). My dad doesn’t mind this; if he had it his way, we would have been named the same way our cats were named: after ancient gods and goddesses. As I said, I got off easy.

I’m a senior at said Allderdice. I took the fact that my name was derived from a play to mean that I should be on stage all my life. I’ve been singing, playing piano, playing guitar, dancing, making costumes, and doing all the techie stuff since I was about three. No one I know can hit a note higher than I hit, or play as many songs as I can by heart, or make a full-length masquerade gown in one weekend, or program an entire show’s light cues as fast as I can. No, seriously: Leo and I once had a bet to see who could write, accompany, and record a song faster; he took two days and four hours, I only needed a day and a half. (I should also note that both songs got the same ‘excellent’ rating from everyone who has heard them- especially on YouTube.)

Our family is generally a musical family, and as such, that is what my life revolves around. I practically live in the landfill that is the Allderdice auditorium- perhaps not an attractive description, but the closest nonetheless. You see, it has a million things going wrong with it. Tiles are ready to fall off the ceiling, the stage is splintering apart, the ropes in the wings are twisted beyond any hope of salvation, the only heater is always broken in the dead of winter while it works perfectly in the summer, there is a musty smell is coming from God alone knows where, the piles of crap in the dressing rooms take up more space than the people do, and the entire auditorium is being used as storage for the rest of the school’s shit. That’s not even an exaggeration: Dressing Room B (the stage left dressing room, for lack of a better name) has a chain-link fence with a lock on it that stores the old attendance records, while the rest of the room holds computers from the 80’s. The side hallway has chalkboards, desks, and trophies that the school refuses to throw out; last year, as we tried to pack stuff away to make extra room, we discovered a long-forgotten and broken swimming trophy dating back to 1967. But we do what we have to and what we can; it’s not as if we have any other choice.

We also have full control of the balcony, which is currently storage for the marching band and choral uniforms, lights, and several computers and switchboards. My two best friends are the only ones who work up there and actually know what’s going on. Lux DuSol is one of the best lighting techies you could hope for, and Mayu Marshall is a good enough sound editor, although it’s only her second passion after video games. Lux, on the other hand, is the best anyone could hope for; she has run all our lighting the past two years and won the Gene Kelly Award for Best Student Lighting Design last year.

I really wish there were something more interesting I could tell you, or some kind of inspirational words I could give you. But, unfortunately, there isn’t.

Welcome to Taylor Allderdice. Please leave all hopes, dreams, and expectations at the door.


	2. Act I: I Can't Help Singing

“Davis, please,” I whined to my gym teacher. “Please don’t make me do this.”

“Aw, come on, Cassie!” Mr. Davis said. “You’re athletic!”

“I’m a dancer! I am balanced, I am coordinated, and I am in shape.” I pointed to the volleyball he was spinning on his finger. “I am not a volleyball player!”

“Cass, come on. Maybe you’ve gotten better since last year.” He tossed the ball to me.

“You have had me for the past three years! You know as well as I do that this is not going to end well and I am not going to get better!”

He blew his whistle. “Zero serving zero!”

My team groaned as I took my place in the back row; we may have only been in school for three weeks, but they had quickly learned how bad I was at these games. I squeezed my eyes shut and served.

“Redo!” Davis called from his position at the net as I ran after the ball I had just sent flying in the wrong direction.

“Do over!” He yelled when I sent it flying at my own team.

“One more time!” He shouted after I managed to hit myself in the face.

“Fourth time’s the charm, right?” I muttered as I tried again. Despite getting it over the net for once, my serve hit someone in the head and the group glares began. I sighed as the ball changed hands and walked up to Davis. “Can I go to the cardio room now?”

He nodded painfully. “Maybe that’s a good idea.”

The door to one of the two fitness rooms was open, and I looked around for a few minutes before I found a working treadmill to walk on, _Avenue Q_ playing in my headphones as I began to read _Cymbeline_.

_“What do you do with a BA in English? What is my life going to be?”_

__“__ ’Tis in my cloak-bag- doublet, hat, hose, all that answer to them,” I murmured under my breath, making sure I would comprehend it, rather than just read.

“ _Four years of college, and plenty of knowledge, have earned me this useless degree._ ”

“Would you in their serving, and with that imitation you can borrow-”

_“I can’t pay the bills yet, ‘cause I have no skills yet. The world is a big scary place-”_

“From youth of such a season, ‘for noble Lucius-”

_“But somehow I can’t shake the feeling I might make a difference, to the human race…”_

“Present yourself, desire his service, tell him wherein you’re happy.”

“Shakespeare?” a voice at the door asked I looked up with a start.

“Yes, actually. What of it?”

The person stepped into the room. I saw he was dressed in basketball shorts, a loose t-shirt, and tennis shoes, probably meaning he was supposed to be in the gym playing hockey with the boy’s class. The shirt said ‘SEN10RS’, so I could only assume that he was in my grade, but I couldn’t recall ever having seen him before. Admittedly, this wasn’t too unusual. When you’re one of 400 people in a grade, you don’t get to know or even meet most of those people. “Nothing. I just didn’t think there were other people who were actually interested in reading his plays.” He took a seat in the stationary bike across the small room, but didn’t actually start pedaling.

I laughed aloud. “Yeah, right. Like you read Shakespeare.”

He looked me dead in the eye. “’Two faults, Madonna,’” he said, “’that drink and good counsel will amend: for give the dry fool drink, then is the fool not dry; bid the dishonest man mend himself; if he mend, he is no longer dishonest; if he cannot, let the botcher mend him; anything that’s mended is but patched; virtue that transgresses is but patched with sin; and sin that amends is but patched with virtue.’”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. “ _Twelfth Night_.”

“Yep. You think you can do better?”

“‘Good sirs, take heart: —we’ll bury him; and then, what’s brave, what’s noble, let’s do it after the high Roman fashion, and make Death proud to take us. Come, away: this case of that huge spirit now is cold. — Ah, women, women! — come; we have no friend but resolution, and the briefest end,’” I said with a smirk. “ _The Comedy of Errors._ Yeah, I can do better than that.”

He stood up and walked over in front of the treadmill. “ _Love’s Labuor’s Lost_. ‘Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun, that will not be deep-search’d with saucy looks; small have continual plodders ever won, save base authority from others’ books. These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights that give a name to every fixèd star have no more profit of their shining nights, than those that walk and wot not what they are. Too much to know, is to know naught but fame; and every godfather can give a name.’”

Glaring, I got off the treadmill and stood right in front of him, which would have been much more threatening if he weren’t a full six inches taller than me. “ _All’s Well That Ends Well_. ‘Even so it was with me, when I was young: If we are nature’s, these are ours; this thorn doth to our rose of youth rightly belong: our blood to us, this to our blood is born; It is the show and seal of nature’s truth, Where love’s strong passion is impress’d in youth: By our remembrances of days foregone, such were our faults; — or then we thought them none. Her eye is sick on’t: I observe her now.’”

He stared steadily at me for a long minute… then began laughing uncontrollably.

“What?” I demanded. “That was right! I dare you to go look it up and tell me it’s wrong! I’ve known that play for years!”

He kept laughing.

“Could you please explain what is so funny?”

And still he laughed.

“I will ask you one more time to tell me why you are laughing and then I’m going to hurt you,” I growled.

He laughed.

I slapped him. Hard.

“What the hell?” He looked at me as if I was crazy. “What was that for?”

“For laughing at me.” “Why’d you hit me so hard? You’re tiny; you shouldn’t be able to hit like that!”

“Oh, because I’m a girl I can’t hit people?”

“No, because you’re tiny!”

I slammed my heel into his toes.

“Would you stop?” He said, clutching his foot. “I think you just broke something!”

“I’ll have you know I grew up with two older brothers; I am perfectly capable of defending myself. Now if you don’t mind, could you tell me what was so funny?”

“Nothing! Nothing is funny anymore!”

“Well something was obviously funny before! Tell me or I swear to god I’ll hit you again!”

He drew back to the bike again. “We were having an argument by yelling Shakespearean quotes at each other! I thought that was funny, but I guess I was the only one!”

I stared at him.

“You really didn’t find that funny?”

I walked over to him, kicked him in the shins, and walked back to the gym.

“Hey, Cass,” Davis called from the net as I walked in. “You going to give this another go?”

I turned on my heel, changed in the locker room, and skipped the remainder of gym class.

After all, when faced with two evils, sometimes it’s just easier to blow them both off in favor of a teacher with a coffee machine.

 

 

“Hey! Cassie!” Mayu laughed when I walked in the room of Mrs. Wilkes, my favorite teacher whose room I had inhabited for four years now. “What took you so long?”

I sighed and passed her my coffee cup. “I, unlike you, am actually concerned with passing my senior year. You really should start showing up more.”

Mayu is one of my two oldest friends. She is a perpetual underachiever to say the least, and believes in video games above all else. She moved here from Tokyo when she was two and looks like it. Her hair is choppy and black in an odd style that gets longer in the front and shorter in the back; like a pixie cut, but a bit more extreme, and it’s streaked a different color every week. She’s hardly the shopping type: she wears a uniform of sweat pants and t-shirts, which on this summer day was replaced by boys’ basketball shorts and a tank top.

“Davis will pass me anyway.” She shrugged as she filled the cup. “I’ve had him two years running plus health class. He’ll pass anyone.” She gave me an odd look as I set my belongings in a desk. “Did you fall on your way here?”

“Yeah, I slipped on a pencil. How did you know?”

“You have someone’s weave stuck to your back.”

I gagged a little, pulled the clump of hair off my shirt, and squeamishly threw it in the garbage can. “Thanks, Mayu.”

“No problem.” She motioned for me to join her behind our teacher’s computer. “Come check out this awful review of  _The Final Destination_.”

“Another one? You’d think they’d have realized ten years ago how stupid the idea was.”

“No kidding.”

We sat, watching stupid video clips and drinking coffee for a while before I spoke.

“Okay, craziest encounter I’ve ever had. You know of any new kids?”

“Other than the 400 freshmen and 50 transfers? Nope,” she said sarcastically. “You find a new creeper?”

“Maybe.” I told her about the encounter in the cardio room. “I don’t know if I should be freaked out or impressed or just ignore it.”

She laughed. “I wish I could have seen you hit him. I know you used to beat up Leo, but I never actually thought you’d beat up a total stranger!”

“Cassie beat up a total stranger?” Lux asked as she and Mrs. Wilkes walked into the room. Well, Wilkes walked, while Lux bounced around until she found a desk to sit on, her shoulder length blonde hair bouncing with her. She hooked her sandals under the seat while she found her balance. She is much more of a girly girl than the rest of us, and it showed: her white mini skirt, floral print tank top, and careful sparkly accessories were hand chosen, just as they were every day.

“I’m impressed,” Wilkes said. “What are you doing on my computer?”

“English homework.”

“Seriously?” She looked at the screen. “What does watching clips from ‘ _Xandau_ ’ have to do with your English homework?”

“It was written in English.”

“Funny.” She kicked me out of her wheelie chair and into another. Wilkes was that teacher, the one that everyone loved and the one that made Allderdice bearable. We teased her constantly about her age, despite the fact she was never more than fifty when I was in her class. Best of all, she was easy going, didn’t mind us making fun of her, and was always willing to let people use her coffee machine. “How are your auditions coming?” She was also charge of the Acting 2 class, a yearlong course that deals in stage productions and performances, as well as the musical. Each semester started with monologue auditions, which we were currently working on.

“Well,” Mayu started, “I know mine is about this person. Or something.”

“I know the first two lines of mine,” Lux added.

“I’m good,” I said.

The three of them rolled their eyes at me. “Cassie, you knew your monologue before you even got it approved,” Wilkes muttered.

“That’s not true. There are some movies I haven’t seen before.”

She put on a fake look of shock. “Really? Cassandra Hathaway is admitting that she doesn’t know everything?”

“Very funny.”

“I thought so.” She turned to her computer. “By the way, we’ve got a new actor in this class.”

The three of us jumped to attention. “Who are they, where did they come from, what is their experience level, when will they be here, and why are they transferring so late?” Lux, English geek to the end, asked.

Wilkes pulled up her attendance sheet. “He is Duncan Hard-To-Pronounce-Russian-Last-Name, he is a transfer from Baldwin, he looks like he’s been in their three musicals, and he’ll be here today. And hell if I know why he’s transferring so late.” I couldn’t help but laugh at her disgusted face; then again, there wasn’t really a more appropriate response to the disorganization of our school and scheduling system.

The high-pitched screeching of the electronic bell rang at that moment, but none of us made any motion to move. Now that it was second period, we were actually supposed to be in Wilkes’ room, I slid my wheelie chair over to the desks where an unusual group soon congregated, and a very deep discussion of musical auditions began.

“-thinking of singing some Taylor Swift song,” my friend Jo mentioned. “I just don’t take this seriously enough to do anything else.” She cracked her gum and pushed back her purple-black hair (mostly purple) for the hundredth time since she’d walked in.

“No kidding,” my best friend and favorite tenor Colby muttered with a frustrated ruffle of his hair. He quickly wiped his forehead on his t-shirt; it was still pretty much summer, and the air conditioning was, as always, broken.

“Like you have anything better.” Gum snap, gum snap, gum snap.

“As a matter of fact, yeah. ‘Music of the Night’ from  _Phantom of the Opera_.”

Hearing him say the title of the musical, I let out what I had hoped was an inaudible squeak of excitement, which apparently wasn’t as inaudible as I would have liked. I watched as a mob of slightly confused theatre geeks turned their heads in my direction at the speed of sound.

“Something’s going on!” Lux’s lighting protégé Dakota declared.

“No it isn’t!”

“Of course!” Colby said. “You always squeak when something’s going on. You want to tell us something that you know you can’t.”

“There’s nothing to tell!”

Jo laughed. “Colby mentions  _Phantom of the Opera_ and you squeak? Honey, you may be a good actress, but you’re a terrible liar.”

“There is nothing I’m lying a-”

“TELL ME!” Mayu screamed as she made a rather dramatic jump into my arms and sent the wheelie chair sliding across the floor. “Tell me whatever it is you know or I’m never going to get off you.”

I spit out the strands of her bangs that had stuck to my mouth and gave the group surrounding me a look as I tried to detangle the mess of arms that were cutting off my air supply.

Mayu’s assistant Greg stared, horrified. “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what’s going on right now.”

“And usually I’d be prying her off you,” Jo said with a shrug, “but this time, I’m disappointed she got to you before I did.”

I sighed. “Mayu, kindly remove yourself and I’ll tell you what I know I shouldn’t be telling you.” She did so before I continued, getting as much as I could in with one guilty breath. “So you guys know that I got promoted to student director this year, and I had a meeting with Wilkes the other day and we were looking through the catalogues and the budget and when it comes down to it we have a really fantastic budget this year so we were thinking we need to do something huge because you know now we can afford it and its going to be insane and so hysterical to try and get everything done but we made the decision and…” I squeezed my eyes shut and took one last breath. “We’re going to be the first high school to do  _The Phantom of the Opera_.”

There was a deafening scream that filled the room, causing all the other groups, Mrs. Wilkes, and several passers-by in the hallway to stop and stare, and it only took a second for me to be swept up in the excitement.

As it died down, I realized there was someone by Wilkes’ desk, looking at me intently, but without the assertion of insanity the rest of the room had. No, this boy was looking me up and down… and  _laughing_ , the same way he had been when I’d met him in the cardio room.

“Hey, Drama Queen,” the guy I could only assume was Duncan said. “Looks like you’re not a completely terrible person after all! In fact,” he said as he took a few steps closer, “it looks to me like you’re actually  _fun_.”

I don’t know what the appropriate response to that was, but I quickly discovered that it was most definitely  _not_  bitch slapping him.

 

“I’m bored!” I yelled over the sound of bells in Horatio’s bookstore as I walked in.

My eldest brother shook his head, not even looking up from the stock list he was holding. “Could you please keep it down?” It’s been years since he moved out, but he still has to see me every day when I invade his bookstore on my way home from school. He looks like a Hathaway, but only my dad’s half; red-brown hair, a stockier build, and pale skin.

“I don’t want to.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll tell Mom if you don’t.” Six years out of the house has failed to make him grow up past the age of 12 when it comes to bickering. “I thought you were doing musical preparation today.”

“Mrs. Wilkes is doing damage control.”

He looked up for a second over the wire-rimmed glasses he had perched on his nose. “Please tell me you didn’t kill someone.”

“Bitch slapped, but no. Someone seems to have raided the stage crew room and stolen some supplies that really shouldn’t be hanging around the school.”

“Such as?”                                       

“Power tools, a hand saw, and a few hammers.”

“Same old Taylor Allderdice,” he sighed. “Could you stock these for me?”

“Maybe, if you tell me if you have a book I want to read.”

He sighed again, forcing the books into my hand. “Put those away, and then I’ll do a stock search for you.”

I twirled around the shop, putting the various books on their shelves, dancing to “Keys (Mariana)” from  _Passing Strange_  as I sang it under my breath. “ _Hey, Mr. LA, I know a place you can stay. Right next door there’s a nice flat; yeah, its okay. The roommate’s gone to Spain, the place is sloppy; it’s insane. But the sun shines through big windows; only Dracula would complain. No one’s ever there, you’ll have your peace; there’s a view and a bottle of gin. She’s back in, oh, two or three weeks; the room will be all yours ‘til then. So here’s the keys: my keys. Here is m-”_

“What!” Horatio suddenly screamed from the front of the store. I heard his feet slapping the floor as he ran in my direction.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“You bitch slapped someone?” He asked, his eyes wide and terrified.

“Twice. And kicked him in the shin. And-”

“I don’t want to know!” He rubbed his temples for a second and leaned against the bookshelf. “Did you have a good reason?”

“Yes, Mom, he was laughing at me and then called me a drama queen.”

Judging by his expression, that wasn’t a good enough reason. “Drama queen?”

“Someone who is too dramatic to deal with _?_ ”

“I know what a drama queen is; our sister is one.” Another minute passed. “Is he pressing charges?”

“Nope,” I said, back to my stocking. “Not this time.”

He sighed again. “How the hell did our parents raise you without killing you?”

“Oddly enough, I get asked that a lot.” I pulled him away from the books. “There. All of your books are put away. Find me my book!”

“I don’t know; I’m pretty comfortable right here. Dealing with you wears me out pretty fast.”

“You promised!” I tried to push him over, which made him laugh.

He stopped for a second, looking at me.

I stared at him.

At the same second, we began a race to his computer, with him winning as I knocked over a stack of  _Twilight_  copies. As I proceeded to pick them up, scolding him for keeping such a travesty in his store, he sat in his chair with an official kind of air. “Name your author.”

“Leroux. Gaston.  _La_ _Fantôme de_ _l’Opéra_.”

“Again?”

“Yes, again.” I propped my head up in my hands as I stood across from him. “I want to have it fresh in my mind so I can help Mrs. Wilkes with the staging this year.”

“You do know this is the awful basis for it, nothing like the show or movie.”

“I know, I have read it before.” I started at him; waiting for the reaction I knew would be coming.

A minute passed.

“Whoa, wait!” His eyes nearly shot out of his head. “You’re doing the  _Phantom of the Opera_  for your senior musical?”

“Your reaction time is getting much better. Yeah, Wilkes and I decided on it last week and it… accidentally got out to the general public today.”

“Seriously?” His disbelief was funny as he fell back in his chair. “I had to be Che. I had to be a communist my senior year. I had to do  _Evita_. And you’re doing the most famous musical in all of musical theatre history?”

“You’re funny when you’re going crazy.”

“This is huge. This is epic. You guys should be working on it right now!”

“I know. We were going to see if we could start working on the chandelier, but as I said, potential murder weapons tend to take precedence at ‘Dice.”

He sighed yet again as he typed at his computer. “Yeah. That I remember.”

 

“Shall we?” Mrs. Wilkes asked me several days later.

I pried open the door to the auditorium. “We shall.”

The auditorium was musty from the lack of use, but it didn’t matter to me. This was where I lived. I kicked off my shoes and rond-de-jambe-d my way to the stage, dropping my belongings haphazardly along the way.

“Careful!” My director yelled as I landed on the stage with a single jump and made my way to the piano. The thing was old, a simple upright that was bordering on out of tune. I pushed it out onto the stage and ran my hand along the keys, clunking out a simple melody.

“Lovely.” Mrs. Wilkes took her seat in the first row. “You want to do your audition while we wait?”

“Only if you think you can put up with me.” I smiled and played a few comical chords.

“Now, if you don’t mind?” She loved me, she loved our shows, but she hated having to stay late after school and was always showing it.

I smiled, ignoring the impatient woman taking her seat in the front row, and took a thick book out of my music bag, placing it in front of me on the piano. “And now a rousing rendition of “Green Finch and Linnet Bird”, from  _Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street_.”

“Cassie, please.”

I played through the annoyingly modern, unconventional, Sondheim-ic accompaniment, effortlessly singing every note and ending with a more than excellent vibrato on the final C.

“Thank you, Miss Daaé!” Mrs. Wilkes called as she made notes on a paper that I was sure had my name on it.

“Seriously? Already? You haven’t even heard anyone else yet.” I gathered my music and dumped it with the rest of my stuff.

She shook her head. “I’m not saying no one else is good, I’m saying you’re the only girl I’ve ever met who can sing up to high D and could do Christine’s part. Besides,” she said with a hint of a smile, “I think you would take a hit out on me if you weren’t.”

I smiled widely as we began the rest of the auditions. Some were good, some were great, and some were so bad I dreaded having eardrums. Colby did a wonderful “Finishing the Hat”, Jo did a fairly okay Taylor Swift impression as she had promised, my friend Eric sang “I’m Alive”, and a few other musical friends gave their best shot at some of my other Sondheim, Kitt, and Schwartz favorites.

As a friend named Andrew left after a less-than-pleasing version of “Some Girls”, which he had botched just enough to make me hate, I began to pack up my stuff… at least, until I heard a voice at the stage.

“Hey, Drama Queen,” Duncan said. “Don’t go leaving yet. I need some piano accompaniment.”

I glared at him. “Mrs. Wilkes, he isn’t on the list!”

“I know I’m not,” he said quickly. “Mrs. Wilkes, I sent you an email?”

She smiled widely. “Right. He emailed me,” she mentioned a little later than she should have, “yesterday. He didn’t know about the auditions.”

I sighed. “Give me your music.”

“Whoa, sweetie. Maybe you should be a little more pleasant.” He looked at me with an annoyingly smug smile.

I sighed again and stuck a smile on my face. “Give me your music, get up here, and quit giving me nicknames or I’ll strangle you with your own book bag strap.”

“See, now was that really that hard?” he asked as he passed me the papers.

I scanned over them. “Uh, we’ve got a problem.”

“What now, Cassie?” Mrs. Wilkes asked, exasperated.

“This is a duet. An extreme duet. As in, he’ll only be singing every other line.” I turned on him. “I’m sorry, you can’t sing this. And I can’t play this.”

“Cassie, just sing it with him.”

I was genuinely speechless. “What?”

“Duncan just moved out here. He mentioned that he only had this limited amount of music and I said it would be fine. Just sing the other part so I can go home.”

I sighed and grudgingly worked my way to the piano. “Duncan What’s-His-Face and Cassandra Hathaway will now perform ‘When You’re Home’ from the Tony Award winning musical  _In the-_ ”

“Cassie!”

“Alright, alright, I’m playing!” I made a motion to Duncan as to where he was to start.

“Nope,” he said smugly.

“‘Nope’ what?”

“Start at the beginning. Nina’s part.”

“I already did my audition.”

“You’re not auditioning. You’re singing to help a friend.”

“Who said you were my friend?”

“CASSIE!”

“Okay!” I rolled out the first few chords and took a breath. “ _I used to think we lived at the top of the world, when the world was just a subway map and the one-slash-nine climbed a dotted line to my place_.”

“ _There’s no nine train now_ ,” Duncan told me.

“Right.” I sighed. “ _I used to think the Bronx was a place in the sky, when the world was just a subway map… and my thoughts took shape-”_

“- _on that fire escape_ …” we sang together, his harmony absolutely perfect.

“ _Can you remind me of what it was like at the top of the world?_ ”

He paused. He smiled.  _“Come with me!_ ”

I picked up the tempo, felling myself get into the music, much to my displeasure.

“ _We begin July with a stop at my corner fire hydrant-“_

_“You would open it every summer!”_

_“I would bust it with a wrench ‘til my face got drenched, ‘til I heard the sirens. Then I ran like hell!”_

_“You ran like hell!”_

_“Yeah, I ran like hell.”_

_“I remember well!”_  I felt a smile creep on to my face as much as I tried to fight it. Damn this song for being so much fun.

“ _To your father’s dispatch window, ‘Hey let me in, yo; they’re coming to get me!’”_

_“You were always in constant trouble!”_

“ _And then your dad would act all snide, but he’d let me hide; you’d be there inside!_ ” He was having so much fun with the song and noticed my smile. He was actually trying to show me around some old street. And damn it, he really did make it even more fun.

_“Life was easier then!”_

_“Nina, everything is easier when you’re home! The street’s a little kinder when you’re home! Can’t you see that the day seems clearer now that you are here, or is it me?_ ” He even managed to look embarrassed. “ _Maybe it’s just me…_ ” And then he brightened up. “ _We gotta go, I wanna show you all I know, the sun is setting and the light is getting low-“_

_“Are we going to Castle Garden?”_

_“Maybe, maybe not, but way to take a shot, when the day is hot I’ve got a perfect shady spot a little ways away that oughta cool us down-“_

_“Cool us down?”_

_“Welcome back to town!”_

I hated that I couldn’t get up and dance. I hated that I couldn’t go all out with the accompaniment. And I hated him for picking this fantastic song.

“ _Now back at the high school when it darkened_ _, you_ _’d hang out at Bennett Park_ _, and_ _-”_

_“Usnavi would bring his radio!”_

_“As I walked home from senior studies, I’d see you rapping with your buddies!”_

He laughed a real, honest-to-god laugh. “ _The volume high-“_

_“I walked on by!”_

_“You walked on by!”_  He smiled even more and spun once around the stage, and suddenly he was Benny, showing me all of Washington Heights- the his best friend’s bodega, Daniela’s salon, my dad’s dispatch, Abuela Claudia’s front steps, Piragua Guy’s cart- and I had to admit, he was  _good_.

“ _When you’re home, the summer nights are cooler when you’re home!”_

 _“Now that you’re here with me_ ,” I said, wishing more than ever I could get up and dance.

_“And that song you are hearing is the neighborhood just cheering you along!”_

_“Don’t say that.”_

_“What’s wrong?”_  He did the transition seamlessly as I took the tempo down.

 _“Don’t say that! When I was younger I’d imagine what would happen if my parents had stayed in Puerto Rico! Who would I be if I had never seen Manhattan, if I lived in Puerto Rico with my people? My people! I feel like all my life I’ve tried to find the answer: working harder, learning Spanish, learning all I can! I thought I might find the answer out at Stanford, but I’d stare out at the sea… thinking, ‘Where am I supposed to be?’ So please, don’t say you’re proud of me when I’ve lost my way._ ” I belted it. I loved it. I made it fantastic and I made myself proud.

And suddenly I found myself dumbfounded when he began to sing. “ _Then can I say: I couldn’t get my mind off you all day. Now listen to me: that may be how you perceive it, but Nina, please believe that when you find your way again, you’re gonna change the world and then… We’re all gonna brag and say ‘we knew her when!’ This was your home!”_

 _“I’m home!_ ” I was amazed that it was possible to get even more into it, but the final tempo change did it.

_“Welcome home!”_

_“When you’re here with me-_

_“Welcome home!”_

_“I used to think we lived at the top of the world-_

_“You’re finally home-”_

_“I’m home-”_

_“I’m home!_ ” We both belted as I rolled the final chords.

The note ended and I looked up to see him smiling mischievously over the piano. Mrs. Wilkes gave us a modest clap.

“Fantastic. I’ve got to go.” And she ran out the door.

I couldn’t stand the smile he was giving me. “Do you have something to say?” I asked as I made my face drop.

He looked smug. “I just made you smile. I just made you have fun.” He got a little bit closer, which I was starting to think was his ‘thing’. “I just made you sing with me.”

I glared more intensely that I had in a while. “You have plenty more music at home, don’t you?”

“Enough. Plenty that I’m sure I know better.”

“You set me up.”

“I guess I did.” He smiled. “What’re you going to do about it?”

I responded by throwing the pages in his face, demi-jettéd my way to my belongings, and jazz walked my way out of the auditorium, throwing everything in my car’s trunk without a look back.

After all, I was in official student director mode, and, as much as I wanted to, student directors do not clothesline their cast members and kick their legs out from under them.

 

“Why do you have to ruin my life?” Antigone practically yelled as she walked into the room. I looked up from the pattern I was cutting out just long enough to give her an uncaring look; my younger sister was an absolute slave to fashion and the textbook definition of a high school girl. She’d kill me for saying this, but at that moment her hair smelled of chemicals as she dyed it her signature red, a bloody color that could not occur in nature.

“Teenage dramatics, how I loathe thee,” I muttered with a wrinkled nose as I returned to the slave costume for the Hannibal Ballet scene.

“I’m serious!”

“So am I.” I tossed another pattern envelope at her. “Make yourself useful and cut out those pieces while you complain.”

She sighed and situated herself on what used to be Leo’s desk. “People are talking.” She ignored the pattern and started to inspect her nails, which were painted a bloody red similar to her hair.

“I figured. There’s not much else for those who lack lives of their own to do around that school.”

“About you.”

“Again, I figured, or I wouldn’t be ruining your life. Can we get on with this, please? I’ve got my voice lesson in two hours and I wanted to finish these soon.”

“They’re talking about you and Duncan.”

I stopped and looked up. “Me. And Duncan. The guy I keep beating up.”

“Yes. And it’s causing huge problems!”

“Well, I’m sorry people have been mentioning my name been more than yours this week-”

“Not that!” She sighed as if she was talking to the densest mainstream student. “You’re beating him up! It’s ruining everyone’s opinion of me!”

Believe me, I was confused. “My anger… is reflecting badly… on you?”

“Yes! People think I’m related to even more of a freak!”

I stared at her. “You cannot be serious.”

“I  _am_! And what’s worse, they’re saying he’s putting up with it because he thinks he can win you over!”

I laughed. “Please, I figured that out ages ago. This isn’t some bad Lifetime movie. I can actually see what is happening around me.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

I looked at her, then at the pattern before me, then to my watch, then back at her. “I’m going to finish cutting out this costume so I can get the prototype to Wilkes tomorrow. Then I’m going to go to my voice lesson. And then I’m going to bed.”

Antigone made some kind of angry screech that only several animals could hear and threw the pattern on the desk before storming out.

“Seriously! And people call me the drama queen!” I yelled after her.

 

‘Giddy’ does not even begin to describe me when a cast list comes up. I can think of nothing more exciting, and that’s what I told Lux as we sat in homeroom.

“I don’t get why you’re excited,” she said. “Everyone already knows you’ve got the lead.”

“But maybe I didn’t.”

“Yes you did.”

It was true, but I shrugged. “I don’t know what parts everyone else got!”

“So you can ask them.” She didn’t even look up from her book. “I seriously don’t get how you’re this excited.”

“And that’s why I’m the theatre person and you’re the techie.”

She sighed as the bell rang and I bolted out the classroom at the speed of sound. It wasn’t even a minute before I was in front of Wilkes’ door, Mayu close behind.

“What’s it say?” She asked a little too loudly in my ear.

As I knew it would, a smile spread wide across my face. “Christine Daaé, lead soprano!”

She squealed and hugged me. “Yay Cassie! Who else got the parts?”

“Colby got Raoul, Jo got chorus, Alison is Carlotta, Andrew is Joseph Buquet, Stephie is Madam Giry, and… oh god…”

“What? What is it? Tell me!”

“… Duncan. Duncan is the Phantom of the Opera.”

Mayu whistled low. “I didn’t see that one coming. I thought for sure he’d be Raoul!”

I glared at her.

“What? Christine ends up with Raoul. The way things are going, I was  _sure_  that’s how you two would be cast!”

I made a frustrated noise and made my way to Wilkes’ wheelie chair. “This sucks! I have to be in love with him!”

“Well, don’t I feel honored.”

I felt my jaw clench as I slowly turned to face Duncan, standing smugly in the doorway. “Yeah, it’s obviously something I’m so excited about.”

He smiled and sat on the desk nearby me. “Ouch. Is that any way to treat a phantom? Especially one you’re in love with?”

I slid my chair across the floor and faced him, staring him down. “Duncan, let me tell you something. I take this musical very seriously. This is my life we’re talking about here. Aside from the Acting II shows I do and the summer CLO shows and whatever else comes my way, this is the most important thing in the world to me. And I’m not going to let some transfer who got lucky ruin it for me.”

He smiled smugly. “And if I do?”

That pissed me off fast. I made a motion to bitch slap him again, but he saw it coming. He grabbed my wrist. Whatever he did, I was not getting out of it.

“What the hell?” I struggled for a minute, achieving nothing but a shooting pain up my arm.

“Now listen to me,” Duncan said, getting off the desk and standing at his full height (bringing me with him, to my displeasure). “I’m glad you can defend yourself. I’m very happy to see you have no problem taking charge.” He suddenly had a look of total hate. “I’m done letting you think you’re in control.”

I tried to remember the flips Leo had shown me.

“From now on, if you hit me, I hit back. It’s far from cute now.”

What was Mayu doing? Why wasn’t she punching him or something?

“You do know how  _The Taming of the Shrew_  ends, right?”

I tried to hit him with my free hand. He caught it just as easily as the first.

“Sorry, I’m starting to recognize what you look like when you’re hitting someone. Well, me.” He smirked. “I’m looking forward to working  _with_  you, Cassandra.”

I’m sure he thought implying he would not be working  _for_  me would piss me off. It did.

“Let go of me,” I calmly muttered, “before I drive the heel of my boots into your foot.”

Again, with the damn smug smirk. “Go ahead. Let’s see how well you dance with a broken foot.”

I stared at him dumbstruck. Even after he let go of my hands, nodded goodbye to Mayu, and left, I still found myself awestruck in the worst way possible.

A few minutes after the late bell rang, Mayu finally moved from her seat on the windowsill and stood next to me, still staring at the door he had walked out.

“What just happened?”

I shook my head and collapsed back into my chair. “I have no idea. I think I just got told off.”

“Dude, no kidding.”

There was silence for a while.

“Do you think he meant it?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” I slid over to the computer and slowly regained my consciousness. “But I have not a single desire to find out.” I sighed and opened Neopets as Wilkes walked in.

“There’s my Christine!” she said loudly with a smile. “Congratulations, Cassie!”

“We all knew she was getting Christine,” Mayu giggled at Wilkes hugged me.

“I have only one question with this casting,” I began. Wilkes, anticipating this typically Cassie-like behavior, could only sigh. “I swear it’s only one! And it’s not that terrible!”

“Should I even guess?”

“Why did you cast Duncan as the Phantom?”

She smiled. “He was amazing! You were there at his audition!” She retook her computer and closed my game. “He was so into it, and his voice is golden. And the chemistry between you two was electric! I could have gotten electrocuted!”

“Chemistry?” Mayu and I asked at the same time, mystified.

“Yeah; Mayu, you should have seen them. They were working off each other, their voices went perfectly together, and there was this clearly love/hate thing going on. As much as she didn’t want to have fun, Cassie was so  _into_ it. There was no other choice. I’m starting to think I should video tape the auditions,” she said offhandedly as she turned to the computer, ending the discussion.

I did the only logical thing to do. I went to the back of the room, found the pillow left on the makeshift cot that had developed over the years, and screamed into it as loud as I could.

 

Several days later, I was situated on the apron of the stage, smiling to myself as I went over the libretto that I had gotten from Wilkes. It was time for our first cast meeting, and I was early.

“What up?” Dakota yelled as she walked in, followed closely by Greg.

“Not much.”

Greg sat next to me. “What are you working on?”

I showed him the book. “I’m doing the staging for the Hannibal Ballet. I figure, since I’m the only one who really does ballet, I’ve got to do all the choreography.”

Dakota laughed. “Have you seen some of the freshmen?”

“And sophomores and juniors and seniors, yeah. Several of them are simply screwed.” I got up and did a small part of my routine for them. “But that’s okay. I’m sure I can pound it into their heads. I mean, I have been doing this for just about ever.”

“And that, my fine furry friends,” Mayu suddenly shouted from the balcony, “is why we are not in the cast!” She laughed, waving the Starbucks cup she had in her hand.

“What are you doing up there already?” I yelled to her.

“Testing a new Audacity song!” She pressed a button and I heard the telltale chords of “La Vie Boheme” start playing. If you don’t know the song, you should; it is the quintessential Broadway song, translating to “The Bohemian Life”, and an anthem to the risqué, illegal, less-than-pleasant, and exceedingly awesome stereotypes held about artists, some of which may be more than a little bit true.

“MAYU I LOVE YOU!” I became giddy with the first notes.

“I know, but it’s not for you!”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

She responded by laughing, which is never a good sign.

“That doesn’t sound good,” Lux said as she joined me on the stage. “Mayu laughing is never a good sign.”

“No kidding.” I looked around at the large stream of cast and crewmembers filling the seats. “Shall we get this show on the road?”

Dakota and Greg responded by racing to the balcony while Lux joined me on stage.

“How are we going to do this?”

“Intros, names of everyone, mention the cast bonding this weekend, and meeting dismissed. Nice and simple right?”

Lux smiled as I went over my notes. “You’ve got to get Antigone home?”

“If I have to hear that child talk about how badly I ruin her life for another day, she’s not going to have a life for me to ruin.” I smiled and jumped up on stage. “Hello everyone!” I yelled just loud enough to get them all to shut up. “Welcome to the first musical meeting of the year!”

No one looked nearly as excited about it as I was.

“Well, since you’re all uninterested, I’ll make this quick. I’m Cassandra, but you can call me Cassie. I’m your student director and Christine this year. I promise I’m not that hard to get along-”

I was interrupted by one of the heavy doors slamming. I looked to see Duncan making his way slowly down in front of the crowd and to a seat. “Hey, Cass,” he said nonchalantly.

“… not that hard to get along with, unless you’re this guy. Duncan, sit down.”

He smiled. “Ask me nicely.”

“Now!”

Apparently, that was nice enough, because he sat down, and the intros continued. We went through everyone’s names, most of which I was sure to forget within a few minutes. After some loud intros from the balcony crew, the attention returned to me.

“I’m going to get this over with fairly fast,” I announced, “unless you want to have a headless director tomorrow. Next weekend at my house, we will be having a cast-bonding day! Mostly it consists of food and pretending to watch the movie of whatever show we’re doing! It’s like from six in the evening until who knows when. That sounds good?”

There was a general murmur of agreement.

“Okay! Cast dismissed!”

Dakota and Greg descended from the balcony, I found my gloves, hat, and bag, and others gathered their belongings. Everyone started to leave until…

“Hey!” Duncan shouted. All the heads turned towards him. “I’ve got an idea for cast bonding!”

I stopped tying my scarf and gripped Lux’s arm tightly. “Tell me this isn’t happening,” I whispered to her. “Please tell me he isn’t doing this.”

“He is.”

“And you couldn’t have lied to me?”

“Go hit him.”

“I can’t, he’ll hit me back this time!”

Unfortunately, by this point, Duncan had found a place next to me on the stage and shut us up with a single look. “Mayu, you up there?” He yelled to the balcony.

“You know it!” She yelled back, hidden by the ancient computers she had built.

“Traitor!” Lux and I yelled in unison.

“Hit it!” Duncan ordered.

Mayu pressed a button, and yelled down as chunks of low chords played. “There was a death in the family.”

Jo jumped on stage and yelled back. “Who died?”

“Our akita.”

Duncan and Colby exchanged a look and pointed at each other as Colby climbed onstage. “Evita!”

Mayu shook her head and continued yelling as she sang. “ _You make fun, but I’m the one attempting to do some good! Or do you really want a neighborhood where people piss on your stoop every night?_ ” She chuckled. “ _Bohemia_ _, Bohemia_ _’s a fantasy in your head! This is Calcutta! Bohemia is dead!”_

Duncan winked up at her before he began to sing. “ _Dearly beloved, we’ve gathered here to say our goodbyes_!”

“ _Dies Irae - Dies Illa_ ” Colby and Eric sang, Eric making his way up the aisle to the stage solemnly. “ _Kyrie eleison, Yitgadal V’ Yitkadash.._.”

“ _Here she lies, no one knew her worth_ ,” Duncan continued as several of the braver senior cast members took to the stage, picking him up and passing him like a corpse down their line, “ _the late, great daughter of mother Earth; on these nights when we celebrate the birth… in that little town of Bethlehem, we raise our glass- you bet your ass-!_ ”

Jo took this opportunity to moon the audience, who laughed and cheered loudly.

“ _To: La Vie… Boheme…_ ”

The people onstage began to dance with each other while Duncan sang. Jo came over and started making me dance with her, a goofy kind of reluctance taking over me. “ _La vie boheme!_ ” we all began to sing on repeat.

“ _To days of inspiration, playing hooky, making something out of nothing, the need to express to communicate! To going against the grain, going insane, going mad!_ ” He pulled Lux away from her folded-arm position on the apron and began to dance with her. “ _To loving tension, no pension, to more than one dimension. To starving for attention, hating convention, hating pretention; not to mention, of course, hating dear old mom and dad!_

 _“To riding your bike midday past the three-piece suits! To fruits! To no absolutes! To Absolute! To choice! To the village voice! To any passing fad!_ ”

Colby ran over and picked him up so that there was a giant Duncan looking down over all of us. “ _To being an ‘us’, for once, instead of a ‘them’!_ ”

“ _La vie boheme!”_

Jo ran and grabbed Lux and kissed her before Lux could say anything. Mayu coughed loudly with a grin from the balcony. “AHEM!”

“Hey mister!” Jo yelled at her with a wink. “She’s my sister!”

An extremely brave freshman jumped on stage and began running to each person. “ _So that’s five miso soup, four seaweed salad, three soy burger dinners, two tofu dog platters, and one pasta with meatless balls!_ ”

“Ew,” someone said.

“It tastes the same!” Greg said indignantly.

“If you close your eyes,” I laughed.

“ _And thirteen orders of fries, is that it here?_ ”

“ _Wine and beer!_ ” we yelled at him.

Dakota grabbed me by the hands and we began dancing at the edge of the stage. “ _To handcrafted beers made in local breweries! To yoga, to yogurt, to rice and beans and cheese! To leather, to dildos, to curry Vindaloo! To huevos rancheros and Maya Angelou!_ ”

Jo and Greg took their turn. “ _Emotion, devotion, to causing a commotion! Creation, vacation-_ ”

“ _Mucho masturbation_ ,” Duncan sang with a mater-of-fact shrug to general laughter.

 _“Compassion, to fashion, to passion (when it’s new)!_ ”

“ _To Sontag_!” Greg declared.

“ _To Sondheim!_ ” Dakota yelled back.

“ _To anything taboo!_ ” I looked to see Jo and several senior girls dancing very close to and with a reluctant and awkward looking Lux.

It was Eric and Greg’s turn. “ _Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunningham and Cage!_ ”

“ _Lenny Bruce!_ ” Greg pointed at Eric.

“ _Langston Hughes!_ ” Eric sang back.

“ _To the stage!_ ” several of us, including me, sang at once.

“ _To Uta!_ ”

“ _To Buddha!_ ”

“ _Pablo Neruda, too!_ ”

Duncan found me and somehow got me to sing in harmony with him. “ _Why Dorothy and Toto went over the rainbow to blow off Auntie Em!_ ”

“ _La vie boheme!_ ”

I heard a ‘thump’ and Mayu coughed again from the balcony. “Sisters?”

I looked and saw Jo was sitting on top of Lux, who had probably been tackled to the floor. “We’re close!” she yelled as Lux rubbed a sore spot on her head, where it seemed to have hit the stage

Greg jumped on Dakota, wrapping his legs around her waist as they both cried, “ _Brothers!_ ” to the laughter of everyone present.

As the other cast members laughed, we all started jumping around again. “ _Bisexuals, trisexuals, Homo sapiens, carcinogens, hallucinogens, men, Pee Wee Herman! German wine, turpentine, Gertrude Stein, Antonioni, Bartolucci, Kurosawa, Carmina Burana. To apathy, to entropy, to empathy, ecstasy; Vaclav Havel, the Sex Pistols, 8BC! To no shame, never playing the fame game!_ ”

Greg was lifted up above everyone to yell, “ _To marijuana!_ ”

“ _To sodomy, it’s between God and me; to S &M!_  _La vie boheme!_ ”

Mayu yelled from the balcony. “ _Waiter, waiter, waiter!”_

Still several feet above everyone, Greg began yelling. “In honor of the death of Bohemia, an impromptu salon will commence immediately following dinner.” He pointed to Jo. “Maureen Johnson, just back from her spectacular one night engagement at the 11th Street Lot will perform Native America travel chants, backwards, through her vocoder, while accompanying herself on the electric cello- which she has never studied!”

“And Mark Cohen will preview his new documentary about his inability to hold an erection on the high holy days,” Eric said with a grand gesture and bow towards Duncan.

“Mimi Marquez,” Duncan indicated me doing a sexy dance, “clad only in bubble wrap, will perform her famous lawn chair/handcuff dance to the sounds of ice tea being stirred.” He pointed at Eric. “And Roger will attempt to write a bitter-sweet evocative song!”

Eric’s air guitar matched the sounds of the accompaniment until Duncan cut him off. “That doesn’t remind us of Musetta’s Waltz.”

“Angel Dumott Schunard will model the latest fall fashions from Paris while accompanying herself on the ten gallon plastic pickle tub,” Dakota said as Greg strutted across the stage dramatically.

“And Collins will recount his exploits as anarchist,” he said, “including his tale of the successful reprogramming of the MIT retro-reality equipment to self-destruct as it broadcast the words:”

“Actual Reality!” we all yelled. “Act Up! Fight AIDS!”

“CHECK!” Mayu belted from the balcony. She was, as usual, the only one loud enough to shut us all up in our tracks. The music stopped for a second while we all stood there. It began again and we all started cheering at the top of our lungs. Mayu had skipped the dramatic song between the A and B parts, and we launched into the B part.

“ _To dance!_ ”

“ _No way to make a living,_ ” I sang as I danced across the apron, “ _masochism, pain, perfection, muscle spasms, chiropractors, short careers, eating disorders!_ ”

“ _Film!_ ”

Duncan spun me around once before strutting across the stage. “ _Adventure, tedium, no family, boring locations! Dark rooms, perfect faces, egos, money, Hollywood and sleaze!_ ”

“ _Music!_ ”

“ _Food of love, emotion, mathematics, isolation,_ ” Dakota sang, “ _rhythm, power, feeling, harmony and heavy competition!_ ”

“ _Anarchy!_ ”

Jo and Greg mimed boxing with each other. “ _Revolution, justice screaming for solutions! Forcing changes, risking danger, making noise and making pleas!_ ”

Finally, with encouragement from those of us onstage, the rest of the cast jumped up and started dancing in the orchestra pit. “ _To faggots, laziest, dykes, cross dressers too!_ ”

They began yelling from the pit. “ _To me!_ ”

“ _To me!_ ”

“ _To me!_ ”

“ _To me!_ ”

“ _To you, and you, and you, you, and you!_ ” we yelled to each other. “ _To people living with- living with- living with- Not dying from disease!_

“ _Let he among us without sin be the first to condemn!_

“ _La vie boheme!_ ”

“ _Is anyone out of the mainstream?_ ” Duncan sang. “ _Is anyone in the mainstream? Anyone alive with a sex drive? Tear down the wall; aren’t we all?_

“ _The opposite of war isn’t peace! It’s creation!_ ”

“Woo!  _La vie boheme…_ ”

The guitar hummed out its last chord as we all half yelled, half sang at the top of our lungs:

“ _VIVA! LA VIE! BOHEME!_ ”

The music crashed to an end and we all started cheering.

“That. Was. Awesome,” Jo said, giddy. “How did he do that?”

“Simple,” Duncan said, appearing over her shoulder. “I gave Mayu half a dozen donuts, coffee, and the promise of those Starbucks chocolate covered espresso beans.” He grinned. “Would you allow me to borrow Cassie for a moment?”

She nodded and went to geek with some friends while I shot her a horrified look as he led me away to the stage right wing, offering me a place on the piano bench.

“I’d rather not.”

“I’d rather you did.”

I glared at him for a second. He made no other motion other than to motion back to the bench.

I sighed as I sat. “Fine. What do you want?”

He opened the piano and gestured towards the keys.

“What about it?”

He pointed again.

“Use your words, big boy.”

He sighed and sat down. “You can play piano, right?”

“Yes, it’s in my resume. I’m better than anyone you’ll know. What’s your point?”

“And you sing. Pretty well.”

“Spectacularly, actually. Get on with it.”

He paused before walking behind the pulley system and producing his copy of the music he’d been given the day before our first meeting. He propped it open on the piano to one of the most legendary songs in musical theatre history, “The Music of the Night”. “You know this song.”

“All three versions, since I began singing. Can you please get on with it? If I don’t get Antigone home by 5 she’ll actually take my head off.”

He gritted his teeth, somehow still smiling. “I don’t know anything about this music or this musical. I need you to teach me. All of it.”

I felt my jaw drop. “The untouchable Duncan, who just got a bunch of people up and singing an impromptu ‘La Vie Boheme’ _,_  is asking the Shrew for help? What makes you think I’ll do it?”

He smiled that damn smug smile that made me want to punch him in the teeth. “I know you’ll do it. This is your senior musical. This is your first chance to be Christine and your final chance to win that Gene Kelly Award for Best Actress. You’re not going to let me screw it up. And you especially wouldn’t want me to screw up a musical with such a legacy.”

Damn. He was right. I was going to do everything in my power to prevent this  _Phantom_  from being the disaster it could be.

“Tomorrow,” I said with a frown. “6th period. I’ll get the key from Wilkes. If you’re even a second late, I’m out.”

“But I have lunch 6th per-”

“I don’t care. I have to give up some of my time, so we’re going to make it convenient for me. And don’t you dare even think about eating while we work,” I commanded. “We’re doing this the right way. We’re doing this until its perfect.” I stood up and walked away, smirking. “We’re doing this  _my way_.”

We left the auditorium and I piled Antigone in the back seat, our crap in the trunk, and Lux in the passenger seat.

“What was that all about?” She asked as I drove too fast towards home.

I smiled widely. “Lux, the tables have turned again.”

She shared my smile. “I like the sound of that.”

“I’ve got him in the palm of my hand.”

She held out her hand for a high-five. “You rock, Drama Queen!” she said, laughing.

“Cassieeeeee!” Antigone’s voice came from the back seat.

I couldn’t help but laugh, throwing the car around a sharp bend and delighting in the returned feeling of supremacy. To me, this was a contest. And I was totally winning.

 

Sixth period found me in the auditorium, as I had been for two hours, making alterations to my funeral clothes so that I could use them for the graveyard scenes. I didn’t even bother to look up from the lace I was working on when the door slammed loudly.

“Cassie?”

“Back here!” I yelled, but with the pins in my mouth, it sounded more like “Ack ear”.

I listened to his footsteps as he slowly made his way to the wing. “Wow. That’s… you made that really fast.”

I took the pins out of my mouth and stuck them in the fabric. “No, not really. These are my funeral clothes; I’ve had these for several years.”

He gave me a look. “You dress up like a Victorian widow to go to funerals?”

“Lately it looks like you’re planning on going from the cemetery to the club. The people in the 1800s really knew how to be respectful.”

He paused. “You’re a freak.”

“Yes; yes I am. You want my help or not?”

He shut up and allowed me a moment to finish pinning the part of the skirt I was working on before carefully moving towards the piano.

“Where do we start?”

I flipped through the pages of his book until I found the song I wanted. “Right here.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Oh, I am. Very serious.” I played the notorious, creepy chords for the intro.

“This is the most important song in the show and you want to me to screw it up first?” He asked, pointing to the music. “I don’t know any of this!”

“This is why I’m here. We’re going to start here and now and with this. You get me?”

He sighed as I played intro. I nodded at him when he was supposed to start.

Sadly, he did not. I went through it again. Still he did nothing.

“You brought me here to help you sing. I can’t do that unless you open your mouth, breathe some air, and actually produce some notes.”

He looked… well, as depressed and hopeless lost puppy, I guess. “I told you I don’t know this.”

“Wait, you mean any of it? I though you just meant ‘Music of the Night.’”

“Nope.”

I flipped slowly to “Music of the Night” and slowly played. “How about this: I’ll sing it through line by line, and you can follow the places you think you know.”

He shrugged. “I guess.”

That was good enough. As I reached the beginning, I began to sing softly. “ _Nighttime sharpens, heightens each sensation._ ” I looked at Duncan. He made no indication that he recognized any of it. “ _Darkness wakes, and stirs imagination… Silently the senses abandon their defenses…_ ”

“Still nothing.”

I sighed. “ _Slowly, gently, night unfurls its splendor. Grasp it; sense it, tremulous and tender. Hearing is believing, music is deceiving, hard as lightning soft as candle light… Dare you trust the music of the night?_ ”

He furrowed his brow and squinted at the page. “What are you doing? Those aren’t the words there.”

“I’m singing my favorite versions put together,” I said with a huff as I stopped playing. “The notes are exactly the same; all you have to do is stick to the melody. Apparently you’re very slow at this.”

“I’m not! I just… I don’t get it!”

“What is there not to get?”

“This! This music! This show!” For the first time since I’d met him, I was watching him lose his calm. “None of it makes any sense.”

He sat down on the bench next to me and looked… defeated. And after all that that guy put me through, I should have loved it. It should have been a fantastic moment. It wasn’t.

I sighed. “Maybe… maybe you need me to explain it to you.”

“Yeah, more than ‘maybe’.”

I looked back at the music and began playing from where I left off. “This song is when the Phantom first takes Christine to his lair, for lack of a better word. He’s been hidden out of sight under the opera house for years because of an awful deformity, which is also why he wears a mask.”

“That much I know.”

I flipped a few pages back. “And this part here, this explains why he has Christine, what this place means to him.  _I have brought you to the seat of sweet music’s throne. To this kingdom where all must pay homage to music… music… You have come here for one purpose and one alone. Since the moment I first heard you sing, I have needed you with me to serve me to sing my music… my music_.”

Still he looked confused.

“He’s saying that he loves this place he’s made, a world dedicated to music. And the reason he loves Christine is because he her voice truly brings his music to life.”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Now she’s completely overwhelmed. Miles under the opera house, just traveled to this place via gondola, not even sure what to think. So he tries to get her to love this place the same way he has. The whole world is hidden in the night and the music is right there in front of him. And for a singer like her, he thinks she should love it, too. So it’s kind of as if, since she loves the music, she should love him, too. Cause he made the music especially for her.”

Finally, he gave me a look of comprehension. “So then, this part here,” he said, flipping the pages, “is when he tries to convince her to love him?”

“Yes! Exactly!”

He paused again. “But… Why is there this huge crescendo and then he stops singing? Wouldn’t that be…? I don’t know, anticlimactic?”

“No. He shows her a life-sized mannequin he’s made of her in a wedding dress and she passes out.”

“…oh. Right.”

“Now come on, back to the beginning. And this time, actually make an effort to sing with me, please?”

“Only if you sing the right words this time.”

Sixth period eventually faded into seventh, and it was only two periods and two and a half songs later, we realized we had just spent well over an hour and a half together- and no one had even been threatened.

 

“I don’t get you two at all,” Lux said as she sat reading on one of my chairs. “You hate him, he likes you, he hates you, he likes you again, you like him, you continue to hate him- could someone please explain this to me?”

“Right after someone explains it to me,” I said. I pulled the fabric I’d been working out of the machine and held it up. “Does this look right to you?”

She looked up for a second. “I guess so. Why wouldn’t it?”

“Because I don’t know exactly how I want this to look. I mean, I know what ‘Past the Point of No Return’ looks like, but I don’t know how I want to look.” I sighed. “Bronze is a good color, right?”

“Yeah, I guess. I mean, it’s just a color.”

“Right. Thanks for your help.” I sighed and returned to trimming the bodice with lace. “I love doing this, but I wish I weren’t so detail-oriented.”

“You’re avoiding the topic.”

“Yeah, there’s a reason for that.”

We sat in silence for a bit.

“I hate waiting.”

“I know.” I turned to her and sighed. “I don’t think I can make it until six.”

“But I’m bored now!”

I began to say something, but was interrupted by the door flying open. This time, though, it wasn’t Antigone in her usual dramatic fury.

“I’m home!” Leo yelled, throwing a duffle bag on what used to be his bed. It landed in a box of fabric scraps. My second oldest brother stared at the disaster around him. “Cass, what the hell happened to my room?”

“It became my sewing studio,” I said, smiling as I removed the bag. “Please don’t move anything, it’s all organized!”

He looked around, horrified, his hand ruffling his short dark brown hair. He pointed a slightly tanned arm towards a corner of the room. “That! That was my desk!”

“And now it’s my sewing machine desk.”

“That’s my bed!”

“Now it’s storage.”

“That was my  _dresser!_ ”

“And now I’m using it as storage for our costumes and various expensive fabrics. Speaking of which, how big is your closet? I need to hang these dresses or they’re going to be disastrously wrinkled.”

He froze and began staring me down.

I stared right back.

He began laughing and hugged me. “Great to be home, sis!” He screamed a little when I hugged him back, accidentally stabbing him with the extra pins I had stored in the fold of my shirt. “You’ve really got to stop keeping those pins everywhere. And look!” He ran over and hugged Lux, who made no indication that she intended to get out of her chair. “My favorite friend of my little sister!”

“Get off me, Leo,” she said, not even looking up from the book. “You’re ruining a really good part.”

“Yeah, nice to see you too.” He moved several boxes off the bed.

“Hey, careful with those!” I took them off him and arranged them in a way most convenient for me. “What are you doing home, anyways? I thought you weren’t supposed to be home until Thanksgiving.”

“Jeez, is no one happy to see me?”

“It’s not that, I just want to know what you’re doing in my sewing studio.”

“You mean my own room.”

“You moved out and I took over! If I keep all this in my room on top of my keyboard, guitar, thousands of books, and editing equipment, I wouldn’t have anywhere to even sleep!”

He looked at the bed, covered in threads and scraps of a hundred different colored fabrics. “Yeah, I can understand the feeling a little too well.”

“Seriously, Leo, what are you doing here?” I loved my brother, and I was very happy to see him, but he never shows up at home unannounced. As a junior at Pitt, he had a fully equipped apartment in Oakland with three friends and as much junk food as a single person could desire in their lifetime.

“I’ve come home for cast bonding night and my little sister’s birthday!”

Lux and I exchanged a glace. “What little sister?” she asked. “Antigone’s birthday was three months ago-”

“And mine isn’t for another 5 months.”

He smiled and handed me an envelope. “Then don’t expect anything in 5 months.”

I opened the envelope and screamed. “You bought me three tickets to see  _Chicago_  at the Ambassador Theater?”

Lux tripped over the chair as she jumped out of it. “You’re kidding!”

“I shit you not, Lux!” He said, smiling brightly. “Although ‘bought’ is such an exact, expensive word. In a twist of fate, I happened to find them in my possession and am unable to attend because I actually have to work over winter break.”

I screamed again. “Leo, I love you!”

“I know.”

I went to jump on him again, but the doorbell interrupted me. Lux and I exchanged a glace before running out of the room to the downstairs.

“You’re welcome!” Leo shouted. 

 

Two hours later, I was surrounded by all of my best musical friends, the majority of the stage crew, Lux’s twin sister Nyx, Mayu’s brothers Bryan and Tim, several other cast members’ brothers and sisters, and my own Horatio, Antigone, and Leo as our cast bonding night took an intermission. Patrick Wilson as Raoul had just whisked Emmy Rossum’s Christine away, Gerard Butler had just done his Phantom’s declaration of revenge against them, and we were all out of food.

Despite the early fall cold that was the usual Western Pennsylvania, I made my way outside to order more pizza. Since the first round had been won by Mineo’s, the next call went out Aiello’s. A girl from my physics class picked up.

“Could I get ten pineapple pizzas and five cheese pizzas for delivery?” I asked, starting to wish I’d grabbed my jacket. “No, and, uh, twenty orders of Aiello’s fries with a large container of cheese.” I listened while she read back the order. “Yep, that’s right, and five orders of garlic wing dings, and… oh, hold on-” I turned around to yell into the house, but Duncan was standing right behind me. I screamed.

He chuckled. “Glad to know I have that affect on you.” He grabbed my phone and put his hand on my head. “Hello? Mm-hmm, we also need four orders of jalapeno poppers, three orders of breadsticks, and two orders of breaded zucchini.”

I rolled my eyes and batted his hand away. “And a partridge in a pear tree.”

He laughed at whatever the girl on the other end said. “Yes, that is everything. I’m quite sure. Seriously, I can go inside and double check. … Okay, that’s 6622 Beacon Street. Old Victorian house with the gate, you can’t miss it… Yes,  _that_  old Victorian. … Okay, thank you.” He clicked my phone and gave it back to me.  “The bill comes to $542.75. And she wants a tip.”

I sighed. “Thank god we have the Cast Bonding Fund.” As per tradition, every cast member chipped in about $20 for the party, and the host only ended up paying a small chunk of the food price. “Did she say how long?”

He shook his head. “But I wouldn’t worry. The next hour looks like it’s going to be spent between ‘Never Have I Ever’, dancing, and as close as they can get to beer pong.” I have nothing against drinking, despite the fact I never did any myself, but underage drinking would warrant a full out ritualistic slaughter by my parents if it occurred in their house.

I sighed again, accidently chattering my teeth with a shiver. “Sounds like fun.”

He looked concerned for a minute. It freaked me out, so I turned around to watch the street. “You okay?” He asked. I felt him put his sweater over my shoulders.

“Yes, prince charming,” I said sarcastically with an eye roll. “I’m sleepy. Hosting the Pre-Show Cast Party takes a lot out of you.” I shrugged the hoodie off and handed it back to him as I walked inside.

Over the course of an hour, the dancers became quickly exhausted, the Mountain Dew Pong players became much more hyperactive, and the Never Have I Ever-ers lost interest. I found myself floating between these groups, smiling and enjoying the company, when I saw Lux and Nyx carrying the mountains of pizza boxes through the rooms.

“PIZZA IS HERE!” They yelled together at the top of their lungs. A mob of hungry theatre people practically attacked them on the way to the dining room.

I sighed and grabbed my wallet, ready to pay the tip. I opened the door and smiled at the delivery guy.

“Sorry about all that,” I said with a smile and I counted the tip in my head. “Theatre people. Always hungry and always loud.” I held the money out to him.

He smiled and shook his head. “The bill was paid.”

“I know. The ‘rents always do; I’d probably lose it all. This is for the fact you had to lug all of that here practically in the middle of the night.”

He shook his head again and turned to leave. “Your brother paid as he left.”

I shrugged. “Sweet.”

Somewhere in the house, I found Horatio shoving fries into his mouth and hugged him.

“What’s that for?” he asked.

“For paying the tip! I owe you one.”

He got a terrified look on his face. “How’d you find my wallet? How much was the bill?” He gulped. “Please tell me you didn’t take my credit card!”

I looked at him as if he was crazy- which I’m pretty sure he was. “The guy said my brother paid the tip. Chill, it must have just been Leo.”

Horatio shook his head as I went to find Leo. The exchange was pretty much the same.

“Must have been Horatio!” Leo gasped between jalapeno poppers. “I didn’t even bring money tonight!”

I was confused. I had no other brothers that I knew of, but the guy had definitely been paid.  A buzz of my phone quickly informed me of what had happened.

“If you keep having these parties, Aiello’s will never go out of business,” it read. “Don’t worry about the tip, I’ve got it covered. –Duncan.”

Again, I sighed. My life was turning into a bad teenage girls’ movie fantasy come true. Why me?

 

It was a Tuesday. Or maybe Wednesday. Then again, for all I know, it also could have been a Thursday, Monday and Friday. I was never really good at keeping track of time. Regardless of what day it was, I found myself in the auditorium, laying out on the stage, almost completely asleep. Everything was silent, save for my quiet singing as  _Les Miserables_ played in my headphones. There was no way I was leaving and actually going to class today; I’d been up until two getting a head start on sewing the ridiculously complicated “Masquerade” costumes while simultaneously trying to track red costume satin and thermoplastic from all across the tri-state area for Duncan’s costume- apparently, making a costume of the Red Death takes much more fabric and mask supplies than I anticipated.

The auditorium door slammed, but I made no motion to move. Let a security guard find me, I’d have some kind of excuse. Besides, they’d probably be upset they didn’t think of it first.

But Duncan’s voice surprised me. “Oh. Sorry, I didn’t think anyone else would be here.”

“No worries,” I said, not opening my eyes. “Feel free to stay. I owe you anyways. For the pizza money and all.”

“Isn’t that uncomfortable?” I heard his bag being set on the apron of the stage.

“Well, yeah, a little, but I’m too tired to climb to balcony and use the couch.”

“Isn’t there one in the wings?”

“It’s a slab of wood covered in cheap calico cotton. I slept on it last week and got a bruise on my hip.”

“Ouch.”

“You’re telling me.”

I could tell he was sitting next to me. “Listening to anything good?”

“I’m on a  _Les Mis_  kick this week.”

“That’s depressing. Isn’t it French for  _The Miserable_?”

“Yep. But what’s even more depressing is that listening to it makes me happy.”

“You’re really weird.”

“I get that a lot.”

There was silence. A lot of it. Like enough to go through “Little People”, “A Little Fall of Rain”, “Night of Anguish”, “The First Attack”, and “Drink with Me”. You don’t have to know  _Les Mis_  to know that that is a lot of silence. Finally, he broke it.

“I’m going to ask you a question.”

“Go right ahead.”

“And I need you to answer.”

“Isn’t that usually how Q&As work?”

He ignored me. “Why do you hate me?”

I thought about it. “I don’t know.”

He paused to think. “Well then, why are violent towards me?”

“I don’t know.”

Even with my eyes closed, I could see his confusion. “You don’t know?”

“Not at all.”

“You hate me and try to beat me up and you have no idea why?” I squinted and saw him shake his head a little. “You really are weird.”

“Well, I don’t hate you so much now. I mean, you’ve got a good voice; I could never hate a guy with a good voice.”

“Any logic behind that at all?”

“There aren’t enough of you around.” I rolled over onto my stomach, looking at him with one eye over my folded arms. “I mean, seriously. Do you watch the Tony Awards?”

He looked like he was about to say something, but seemed to decide against it. He lay out on his back near me and held out one of his hands.

“Can I help you with something?”

“Give me one of those headphones,” he said with a sigh. “I need something to listen to.”

“You’re not going to argue with my logic?”

“Fighting with crazy people just isn’t worth it. I’ve been around theatre people long enough to figure that out.”

I laughed a little under my breath. “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” I muttered.

There was more silence. It lasted much longer than the first one, though; I heard a bell ring in the hall, heard the screams of everyone else in the school, drifted in and out of a bizarre half-awake kind of dream, and fought the urge to think. The thinking, unfortunately, won.

“This is my turf,” I finally said.

Duncan turned and looked at me, taking the headphone out of his ear. “Sorry, what was that?”

“This is my turf. That’s why you bother me.”

Pause. “I don’t get it.”

“Neither did I until just now.” I sat up and looked at him. “This stage, this auditorium, all of this theatre stuff is  _mine_. This is what I do.”

A pause. “Okay. What’s that have to do with me?”

“You’re good at it.”

He was very genuinely confused. “Okay, thanks. Why does that bother you? It’s not as if I’m going to steal your parts. I don’t do drag.”

“Yeah, but still! This is my thing, this is what I’ve been doing my whole life! I’m supposed to be the one who runs around quoting Shakespeare and singing everything and knows everything there is to know about this! And suddenly you show up, and you quote  _Twelfth Night_  to me word for word, and you turn out to be this really great singer, and it  _bothers me_!”

“Cass, you hang out with no one except theatre people.”

“I know! They’re the only people in this school I can stand! But I’ve grown up with half of them, and the rest of them aren’t good enough to be blips on my radar! I’m used to them! You, you just came out of nowhere and try to show me up the first time I meet you! It bothered me!”

He stopped and took this in for a bit. I knew he thought I was crazy; even I thought it was crazy. But when he seemed to be done thinking, he held out his hand. I tried to give him back the headphone.

“Nope,” he said, shaking his head. He pointed toward the iPod.

“What about it?”

“Let me see it. Just for a second, I promise I won’t break it.”

I handed it over. He slowly stood up and walked off the stage, up the aisle to the back and vanished, reappearing a minute later on the balcony.

“Name a song you have that you’ve made on Audacity!” he yelled.

“‘The Music and the Mirror’,” I yelled back, unsure of what he was doing or why the song from  _A Chorus Line_ had popped into my head.

He moved some plugs and pressed a few buttons on the sound equipment, and soon I heard my Audacity recording carefully begin.

“Sing!”

And so I did. “ _Give me somebody to dance for… Give me somebody to show… Let me wake up in the morning to find I have somewhere exciting to go… To have something that I can believe in, to have someone to be. Use me, chose me! God, I’m a dancer! A dancer dances!_ ”

I saw him smile as I continued, stepping forward, making my voice bigger and just a little louder. “ _Give me somebody to dance with. Give me a place to fit in. Help me return to the world of the living by showing me how to begin!”_  I smiled and felt the music pound in my chest. _“Play me the music; give me a chance to come through! All I ever needed was the music, and the mirror and the chance to dance for you!”_

I saw Duncan smile as I went full out, totally becoming the character: Cassie.  _“Give me a job and you instantly get me involved! If you give me a job, then the rest of the crap will get solved! Put me to work, you would think that by now I’m enough! I’ll do you proud! Throw me a rope to grab onto. Help me to prove that I’m strong. Give me a chance to look forward to saying, ‘Hey, listen! They’re playing my song!’ Play me the music! Play me the music! Play me the music…_

_“Give me a chance to come through! All I ever needed was the music and the mirror and the chance… to dance!”_

I gave into instinct and immediately began the full out choreography of the song, smiling when I saw Duncan with a huge smile of his own. It was a complicated routine that my first dance teacher had spent weeks teaching me and one of the dances I adored the most. I twirled, jumped, stretched, and stepped in perfect time. Three minutes later, I landed my final spin and looked up at him, waiting to hear what he would say. He wasn’t in the balcony any more, and it was a second before I realized that the song had changed to “So in Love” and he was standing at the edge of the apron.

“And that, Cassie,” he said slowly after a long minute, “is why you never have to worry about being second best. You can’t be second when there’s no one who can be better.”

I smiled and shrugged a little. “Thanks, I guess.”

“So does this make us friends?”

“Yeah, I think this makes us friends.”

He smiled and jumped on stage, looking for a second as if he was about to hug me. I stopped him, holding out a hand.

“Not a big hug person?”

“Give it a little time.”

“You know, if this were a musical, we would start singing right about now.”

“Yeah, and if this were a bad movie, we’d have kissed by now. What’s the point?”

“Aw, come on, Cassie. Don’t you want your life to be a musical? Or a love song?” He was pointing to the balcony, and suddenly “Elephant Love Medley” began playing. “Couldn’t have planned that better!”

“ _Love is just a game_ ,” I sang, giggly.

_“I was made for loving you, baby, you were made for loving me-“_

_“The only way of loving me, ‘baby’, is to pay a lovely fee_.”

He spun around me. “ _Just one night, give me just one night!_ ”

“ _There’s no way, ‘cause you can’t pay!”_

_“In the name of love! One night in the name of love-”_

I laughed. “ _You crazy fool! I won’t give in to you.”_

 _“Don’t leave me this way!”_  He sung, spinning me around _. “I can’t survive without your sweet love, oh baby… Don’t leave me this way!”_

I sighed. “ _You’d think that people would have had enough of silly love songs.”_

_“I look around me and I see it isn’t so; oh, no.”_

_“Some people want to feel the world with silly love songs.”_

_“Well, what’s wrong with that? I’d like to know… Cause here I go again…”_  He spun around and around the stage. “ _Love lifts us up where we belong! Where eagles fly on a mountain high!”_

 _“Love makes us act like we are fools!”_ I stopped him. “ _Throw our lives away for one happy day!”_

 _“We could be heroes!”_ He cried, “ _Just for one day…”_

_“You… you will be mean.”_

“No, I won’t!” He chuckled.

“ _And I… I’ll drink all the time!”_

_“We should be lovers!”_

_“We can’t do that.”_ I shook my head at him.

_“We should be lovers, and that’s a fact!”_

He took me by the hands and spun me around _. “Though nothing will keep us together-”_  I belted.

“ _-We could steal time-”_

 _“Just for one day.”_ Center stage and brilliantly loud, we sang together. “ _We could be heroes forever and ever! We could be heroes for ever and ever! We could be heroes-”_

He started singing his part again.  _“Just because I… I will always love-”_

_“I… I…”_

Together again.  _“Can’t help loving…”_

 _“You…_ ” he sang softly.

 _“How wonderful life is,”_ I told him, _“now you’re in the world…_ ” I smiled as he spun me one more time, wrapping his arms around me in a hug. “You’re going to be bad for business… I can tell.”

He laughed. “You know this is the part in the movie where they kiss.”

“You know if you try that in real life, you lose your teeth.”

“Ah well.” He shrugged. “Worth a shot.”


	3. Act II- Ghost, The Musical

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Full Disclosure: I hate this chapter. This is my least favorite chapter that I've ever written. I mean, there's parts of it I like, of course, but as a whole I dislike it. Maybe I'm being my biggest critic, I don't know. But it's being included because it's part of the story, and perhaps you guys will like it more than I do.

“Five, six seven, eight!” I yelled, clapping the beats out.

The two sides of the stage did their best to go into the small jumpy movements I had choreographed to go with the “Masquerade” music. Their best, sadly, was not as good as I had hoped it would be. I sank into the top of my chair and watched, making a note to tell the stage crew some specific instructions for the staircase they were about to start.

Duncan appeared behind me. “Shouldn’t we be up there with them?”

“You’re pretty strong, right?”

“Yes, but I don’t know what that has to do with my question.”

I responded by falling back into him. “I needed a pillow to make sure I didn’t fall.” I rubbed my temples. “And I’m working on it. I’m trying to teach them all of this before we start dancing so I can still watch what they mess up.”

He nodded, his chin hitting against my head. “Good idea. But this is doing nothing to help your stress levels.” He pulled me up out of the chair and into the pit.

“There’s so not time for this-”

“Clear the stage!” He yelled for everyone to hear. “Cass has got to run ‘The Point of No Return’!”

Jo scoffed a little. “You say that like she doesn’t know it off the top of her head.”

I stuck my tongue out at her. “I’d be more indignant if it weren’t true.”

“She may know it,” Duncan said matter-of-factly, “but I’m still tripping over my own feet.”

This was mostly my fault, and we all knew it. After watching the movie, everyone had decided we liked the Latin theme for the second to last song, so I had made a part of it something like a tango. It looked fantastic, but Duncan was not a dancer.

His singing was still fantastic, though. “Passarino… _Go away! For the trap is set and waits for its prey_ …” He stood behind me as I sat on the apron, pretending to pick the thorns off roses. “ _You have come here in pursuit of your deepest urge, in pursuit of that wish which ‘til now has been silent… silent…”_  He knelt next to me, pulling me close to him. I had to go against all of my instinct to punch him, even though we were friends now. “ _I have brought you that our passions may fuse and merge! In your mind, you’ve already succumbed to me, dropped all defenses, completely succumbed to me… Now you are here with me, no second thoughts. You’ve decided…_ ” He stood up, taking me with him. “ _Decided…_ ”

Our tango began, very close and very clumsy on his part. “ _Past the point of no return. No backward glances, our games of make believe are at an end… Past all thought of ‘if’ or ‘when’. No use resisting, abandon thought and let the dream descend…_ ”

As per my directions, I wasn’t looking him in the eyes, but this was mostly because he was so awkward this early in rehearsals. As suave as he could be every other day of his life, he couldn’t have made his inexperience any more obvious. “ _What raging fire shall flood the soul? What rich desire unlocks its door? What sweet seduction lies before us? Past the point of no return. The final threshold. What warm unspoken secrets will we learn beyond the point of no return…_?”

 I pulled away from him for a second and went back to my imaginary roses. “ _You have brought me to that moment when words run dry. To that moment where speech disappears into silence… silence… I have come here, hardly knowing the reason why. In my mind I’ve already imagined our bodies entwining, defenseless and silent._ ” I went back to him, doing that clichéd ‘singing-right-in-your-face’ thing. This time it was him trying not to laugh. “ _Now I am here with you, no second thoughts, I’ve decided… decided…_ ”

The tango began again, much more intricate and pseudo-passionate. “ _Past the point of no return. No going back now; our passion play has now, at last, begun. Past all thought of right or wrong. One final question: how long should we to w-_ ”

Before I had a chance to scream, I was on top of Duncan, who was prostrate on the floor, groaning.

“I think I tripped,” he said thickly. “And you landed on top of me.”

I could hear everyone who had been watching laughing. “No shit, Dick Tracey.” I rolled off him and sat with my legs crossed, observing him. “Are you okay?”

“You’re really heavy when you fall on top of people, did you know that?”

“Yes, actually; you should ask Horatio about it.”

He held a spot on his stomach where my elbow had landed as I pulled him up. “This happens often?”

“Mostly when I dropkick someone. Which you should expect to happen if you don’t learn this dance soon.”

He sighed and shook his head. “Most guys go after girls who worry about their hair or nails or grades. I’m going after the one who threatens to kill me if I don’t dance.”

Yes, he was still trying to get me to fall for him. I had, after several internal battles and screaming sessions with my pillow, come to terms with the fact that I was now living in a bad Lifetime after school special’s straight-to-DVD sequel.

The school year had quickly jumped into November, and we were in the beginning stages of what I like to call ‘Insane Rehearsals’. It consists of the loss of many cast members, addition of several more, a fury of papers to sign and dues to pay, and quite a few breakdowns from Mrs. Wilkes and me. This time, however, things were going uncommonly well. So far, nothing had been broken and, aside from a minor cold that had been stopped in its tracks, no one had even gotten sick. This was actually considered ‘remarkably well’ by most standards we had developed.

“Can I get everyone down in the house for a minute?” I yelled to the group that had formed near the apron. “I’ve got some announcements to make before we leave.” They all organized, giving me what little attention they could afford to spare.

“We’ve got a great month coming up,” I told them. “Tomorrow I will be doing the first costume fitting for the first hour and a half of practice, so please be prepared with your dance shoes and entertainment.”

A new sophomore named Brea shot her hand up. “Why do we need our dancing shoes?”

“Hemlines,” every senior, junior, and several sophomores who had known me the previous year said together.

“Hey, Cass!” Colby shouted from the tech booth (although why he was there I don’t know). “You turned them into a Greek Chorus! Do it again!” He laughed maniacally.

I looked up at Mayu. “You gave him coffee, didn’t you?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said as innocently as she could.

“Mayu.”

“Yes I did.”

I turned back to Brea. “I’m going to measuring hems. If you don’t have your shoes on, I could make it too short or too long, since shoes change your height or your posture.”

She nodded as if she understood, but I had a feeling she didn’t.

“We need some volunteers, too.” I waved a piece of paper at them. “Sign up here. I need hosts and hostesses for the fashion show on December 6th.”

There was a murmur of intrigue mingled with despair. “Do we have to?” a freshman yelled.

“Hell yes,” half the auditorium said again.

Colby couldn’t stop laughing.'

 

“Stop it!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.

“What?” Lux’s panicked face reflected in the mirror. “What happened?”

I gasped, sweat running down my face. “I’m putting on a corset! It hurts like hell and I can’t breathe!” I swatted at her. “And if you pull those strings any tighter I may vomit.”

She dropped the corset strings. “Then why did you make this a corset?”

“It’s not supposed to be that real!” I took a deep breath and loosened the strings until I could breathe almost normally. “It’s just supposed to look like it. And be only a little tight.I just asked you to tie it a little tight, not pull it until I was snapped in half.”

She grinned sheepishly. “Oops.”

“No shit, Dick Tracey.” I examined the dress in the mirror. “I think this looks pretty great! What’d you think?”

“I think you look like you’re going to pass out.”

She was right, of course, but that was the way it was supposed to look. “I only have to wear this for one song. I’ll be fine.”

She shrugged and we walked into the auditorium. All around people were being helped into their costumes with very little modesty. We all had body suits, of course, so there wasn’t really anything to see, but any random passerby who just happened to find his way into the auditorium was in for one hell of a surprise. Aside from being the most sexually corrupt people in the world, theatre people are also notoriously the least modest in the world. If you become a theatre person, you’d better get used to changing constantly in front of everyone, men and women alike.

“Hello, beautiful,” Duncan said, giving me his hand and leading me down the stairs.

I rolled my eyes at him. “Is that really necessary?”

“Completely.” He looked at me for a second. “Can you breathe?”

“For the most part,” I said with a shrug, realizing I was sweating a bit. “I had Lux tie the corset on this thing and she thought I really meant ‘tie-this-thing-like-a-corset’.”

He shook his head. “Oh, Lux. What would we do without her?”

I fanned myself. “Not vomit?”

“Yeah, that.”

I walked around the people in costumes, helping when there were zipper issues or buttons missing.

“Cassie!” Dakota called as she held her friend Natalie’s dress together. “I’ve got a problem with a zipper that looks pretty bad!”

I went to see what she just to what she was referring. Natalie turned as I approached and gave me an exasperated look.

“I can’t get it on.”

The zipper looked like it was ready to rip out of the dress. “Are you sure you’ve got it on right?”

“Is it that hard to put a dress on?” Natalie snapped back.

“Just asking.” I examined the dress. “I think I see the problem. Part of the dress wassewn together when I sewed the zipper in. I can fix that.” I went to find my seam ripper.

Before I could, I stopped in my tracks. Have you ever had a moment when you just know something is going to go wrong? Or overheard only the smallest part of a conversation and just known it was important? And, as always, known one of those moments where the world goes in slow motion?

It started with a sinking feeling as I heard the end of a question. “-are you reading?” Colby asked a freshman who was completely engrossed in his book.

Then the world went in slow motion as I heard the answer. “Macbeth,” the freshman said just loud enough.

Four of five of us turned and ran at him, yelling, “NO!”

He jumped. “What?”

“You said the name of the Scottish Play,” Duncan said through clenched teeth.

“What?”

“It’s cursed!” I yelled at him. “You never should have said that!”

“What, Macbeth?”

I swatted at him. “Stand up, spin around three times and spit over your shoulder.”

He, and several other people who considered theatre little more than a hobby, stared at me as if I was crazy.

“Fine.” I pulled him up by his collar. “Go run around the building three times, spit over your shoulder, swear, and then bang on the door until someone decides to let you back in.”

“I can’t run that much!” He said. “I have chronic asthma!”

“I have a chronic condition of failure to give a shit! It wouldn’t stop me.”

Despite my rage, Duncan chuckled at this. “Calm down, Cass,” he said, pulling me into a hug. He looked at the freshman. “Freshie, repeat after me: Fair thoughts and happy hours attend on you.”

“Fair thoughts and happy hours attend on you?”

“Like you mean it.”

“Fair thoughts and happy hours attend on you,” he said with a little more finality. “What’s that mean?”

“It’s from The Merchant of Venice,” I snarled. “And it’s a half-assed attempt at reversing the curse.”

“It’s not half-assed,” Duncan said with a smile.

I glared at him.

“Okay, maybe it is, but it’s better than nothing.”

I turned on Freshie. “If anything starts to go wrong, I am holding you personally accountable.”

He held his hands up as if he was surrendering. “I’m not doing anything!”

The universe must have been waiting for that cue, because several things happened at once. The set piece that held the the light programming board that Lux was testingsplintered and snapped under the weight of the electronics it held. Natalie’s dress finally split at the zipper. As Mayu looked over the edge of the balcony to survey the damage, she knocked over a large pile of dictionaries that were used to hold up a desk lamp that could no longer fit programmer’s tables; the dictionaries and lamp fell into the audience with several thumps as they landed and produced screams from cast members. Stage crew guru Ian ran on stage to investigate the events and tripped on part of the curtain, tearing it as he grabbed it on his way down.

I took a deep breath and sighed, which would have been a lot easier if I hadn’t been wearing the corset. Just to top it all off, I fainted immediately.

 

The weekend went as well as I could have expected it too, what with staying inside and trying to think of everything possible to ward off the curse. It was not a pleasant way to spend the days after a major fainting spell earns you a night in the hospital, but it had to be done. I was also not very happy with the paramedics who, instead of simply undoing the ties on the back of the dress’ bodice, thought it would be so much more simple to use scissors to cut it away; day one of costume checks and I had to remake my dress for the most elaborate costume scene in the show.

I dare anyone out there to tell me that the Scottish Play is not a real curse after the month I had to deal with it.

I should have known it would be a bad week when the phone rang at 6:45. On a Monday. When I was already running late because my alarm clock broke. And was not at all pleased that I was going back to the disaster central after only two days. “What?” I snarled into the phone, running out the door with breakfast in one hand, three notebooks in the other, and the phone pushed into my shoulder.

“I’m sick,” a disgusting and nasally voice said from the other end.

I stopped in my tracks. “I hope this isn’t who I think it is. Cause this sounds like  after  eating twenty pounds of expired tuna.”

“It is.”

I sighed. “I don’t think I want to know why you called.”

In response, I heard a crash and a female voice saying, “Hey!” She picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Where’d Duncan go?”

“This is his little sister,” she said. “He went to the bathroom to puke.”

I smiled sarcastically, even though she couldn’t see it. “Great. Tell him to drink about four gallons of orange juice, sleep, and don’t come near anyone else in the cast. Have him call me when school lets out.”

“I can do that!”

“Also, let him know that if I end up sick because of him, I will beat the hell out of him and leave him on the sidewalk.”

“I can’t tell him that,” she said sadly. “Mom says I’m not allowed to swear.”

I clicked the phone shut, walked calmly to the car, threw everything in the trunk, climbed into the driver’s seat, and screamed at the top of my lungs.

 

Storming into Acting II that day, the first person I saw was Greg. This meant he had to be the one to incur the worst of my wrath.

“Ow!” He said when I hit him upside the head. “What was that for?”

I slumped in the wheelie chair. “Duncan is sick.”

“So why did you hit me?”

“Cause you were the first person I saw, sorry.”

I handed him a gummy worm that was part of my breakfast as an apology. “And I can’t deal with this kind of stress right in the middle of November. I mean, what with the fashion show in two weeks, and the construction for the moving gondola beginning tonight, and now our Phantom is going to miss rehearsals?” I sighed and shoved several gummy worms in my mouth.

Jo walked in the room and, looking at my breakfast and the state of my hair, asked, “Breakdown time?”

“In about seven hours,” I said, looking at my watch. That’s right; I’m so efficient that I can plan my breakdowns so they don’t interfere with the rest of my life. “That way we’ll be out of here and I can hit a punching bag instead of Greg.”

“Thanks for taking that into consideration.”

“You’re welcome.” I paused. “Actually, let’s make that in about nine hours. Just in case I have to help Lux with the gondola. I don’t want to be around power tools when I’m angry.”

“Angry Cassie is angry!” Mayu said, sliding across the room in her socks. Why she was missing her shoes, I have no idea, but she was. “I can cheer her up!”

“I can’t wait to hear this.”

She waved a paper in my face. “I just managed to sign up all six teachers you requested to be models, enough stage crew members to be hosts, and am working on producing a nearly perfect replica of Gerard Butler’s signature to auction off at the fashion show!”

I stared at her. “I’m with you all the way up until the part where you get arrested for forgery.”

“Worth a shot,” she said with a shrug, passing me the list. “I guess we can go with a poster signed by everyone.”

I looked at the list. Upon seeing the names, I could only sigh. “What did you bribe them with?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You have the Good Doctor on here,” I said, referring to our English teacher who was more than happy to have nothing to do with fundraising. “Either you’re lying to me, which I know you would never do on a day like today, or you bribed them.”

“Silverman needs someone to do the announcing at the next pep rally,” she said, “Rich has me reorganizing the library during lunch for a week, Diablo got me to go through and replace all the batteries in all her calculators, Barbie needs a total hard drive rewiring, Ms. Diver wants someone to do the announcements for two weeks while the nerd who does them now is on college visits, and the Good Doctor just conveniently had his Mac crash and needs someone to fix it.” I didn’t doubt that she was the reason Barbie and the Good Doctor were having computer problems in the first place. “I’m just that good!”

I smiled. “This is a sign, Mayu. The day isn’t going to be a disaster. Things could be good!” I spun the chair once. “You got the most in demand teachers to be our models. Our one little problem isn’t that bad after all!”

She kept her smile, but began darting her eyes nervously. “Right. Yeah. Um, about that. You know Andrew?”

“The freshman who sang the waiter’s part when we did ‘La Vie Boheme’?”

“Yeah, except now he’s supposed to be Joseph Buquet?”

“Yup. The guy is good.” I stopped. “Wait. Why do you want to know?”

She smiled sheepishly. “Well, I just saw him this weekend. And you know, we were talking, and chilling, he was telling me how he been out on his ATV for a while the other day, and he let me sign his cast-”

She didn’t have to say anything else. I was already screaming again.

 

“Do you believe in curses?” I asked Horatio later that day. I was leaning on the counter in his store, watching a few customers pick through the books.

He sipped his coffee as he leaned back in his chair. “Cassie, we’re a family of theatre geeks. Of course I believe in curses. Not like you do, but enough to be theatrically superstitious.”

“Would you ever say the name of The Scottish Play in a theater?”

He laughed. “No. Not unless I wanted to get killed.” He pushed his glasses back up his nose with his middle finger. “However, unlike you, I have no problem saying Macbeth in here. Because I’m a normal person.”

 He laughed again as I stomped my foot. “I’m just being careful! Would you stop that?”

“No.” He offered me coffee as consolation. “There are just too many superstitions to remember them all. I hold only the most extreme and well known.”

“So, The Scottish Play and the Curtain Calls?”

“There’s a superstition about curtain calls?”

I sighed. “Never practice curtain calls until the entire cast feels like they deserve them.”

“I thought that was just common sense.”

I started naming every one I’d ever heard of, with him shooting them down. “Never say good luck-”

“Who is stupid enough to do that?”

“-Leave on a ghost light-”

“Or save on electricity and don’t.”

“-Leave the theater closed one night a week so the ghosts can perform their own shows-”

“The superstitious way of saying that every actor needs at least one night off a week?”

“-Never use real money, jewelry, or bibles-”

“Because they’re always stolen!”

“-Don’t wear black, blue, green, or yellow-”

“That’s stupid; that leaves almost no colors to wear!”

“-and never wear a peacock feather onstage!” I looked at him triumphantly.

He looked at me, confused. “Now that one I’m not familiar with.”

“It’s the evil eye, casting a curse on everyone on the stage, especially the person wearing it.”

He looked at me for a second before laughing again. “You crack me up. Why all of this curse talk, anyways?” he asked as he got up to stock several books.

I followed him. “There was a freshman who said the name of the Scottish Play in the auditorium last weekend, and I’ve had bad luck following me ever since. And not even just me; Duncan got puke-your-guts-out sick over the weekend.”

Horatio rolled his eyes. “You’re just being Cassie. Bad things happen to everyone, especially in theatre! There’s just so much that can go wrong.”

I stuck my tongue out at him. “Fine! But if I get hit by a bus on my way home today, don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

I turned on my heel and made an attempt at a dignified exit. And I would have succeeded, had I not walked straight into a seven-foot tall freestanding bookshelf, which second later was no longer freestanding.

I looked at Horatio as he surveyed the damage and piles of books on the floor. “I hope you will attend my funeral and remember me fondly.”

 

“Ow!” Jo yelled. She turned to me. “Careful where you put those pins!”

“Jeez, sorry. It’s just a pin.”

“Yeah, a pin that you stuck in my boob!”

Another sigh from me. “For one thing, that was nowhere near your boobs. For another, if you don’t let me finish this, the next one will not be an accident.”

That shut her up.

We were trying on costumes again, now that I had managed to make the alterations we hadn’t had the week before. It was far from my favorite thing, though, unless I was the one doing the modeling. Thankfully, Jo was the last slave girl for “Hannibal”, the opening ballet; sadly, she loved complaining about costumes.

“I feel stupid,” she said. “I look like I’m a hooker.”

“You’re supposed to.”

“Hey!”

“An expensive hooker!”

“I bet yours doesn’t look like this.”

I pointed to my costume hanging across the room. “If anything, I look cheaper than you.”

This seemed to satisfy her, and she shut up until I was done pinning. Unfortunately, she began talking again as I put my own dress on.

“Too bad Duncan isn’t here today,” she said casually. “I bet his costumes need a lot of work.”

“And you think he’d like to see me look like a whore?”

“If you get together by the end of this week, I win the poll.”

This should have shocked me, but I was way beyond that point. I just rolled my eyes. “There’s a poll now?”

“Yup. We’re up to maybe sixty people?”

“Fan-fecking-tastic.” I said. “Who organized it? You know, so I can kill them?”

She smiled mischievously. “Antigone!”

“My sister?”

“Yup!” She adjusted the sheer fabric of her skirt over her bodysuit. “She figured that if she couldn’t get some positive publicity out of it, she might as well try and get some cash.”

I could feel my eyes burn with fury while I clipped my hair up. “I’m going to kill that girl.”

“At least get her to go halve-zies! You can get a great new prom dress with the bets she’s got.” She pulled me to the mirror. “We look like twins!”

I had to admit, my costumes did not disappoint. Tiny gold flowers made a brilliant pattern across the brown solid of the fabric. The bodices stopped just below the boobs, and collars made of brown plastic crystals made circles around our necks. The skirts, long and flowing, were totally sheer and down to the feet; a four inch thick brown belt with identical crystals made thick belts that covered the from the hips down. It didn’t matter that they were sheer, either; each girl had a pair of skintight shorts that were the same color of the skirt and looked like the lower part of a leotard. We were pretty sexy slaves.

“We look hot,” I told her. “This is curing my terrible week a little.”

She grabbed my hand and we skipped out to the wings. The other slave girls were standing there, waiting behind the closed curtain.

“Ready, girls?” I asked. Before they could respond, I yelled to Lux and Mayu, “Hit it!”

The dance began, and we ran onstage to the basic choreography I’d done; once our choreography was finished, I would slowly add the rest of the cast in the gaps we’d left.Everything looked perfect, with the exception of the screw-ups that come from new costumes, and we were everything I expected. For a moment, I a little part of me had a feeling that this wasn’t the disaster I was cracking it up to be.

Until, that is, Jo fell off the stage. Then I wanted to beat that little part of me with a sledgehammer.

I sighed and leaned over the stage. “You okay?”

She was lying back to back on top of Ian. “Yep. He broke my fall.”

“I was re-plastering the stage,” a muffled voice said from beneath her, “since you mentioned all those holes from people kicking the wall.”

I nodded. “Get a vacuum to clean up the plaster dust, get Jo out of that costume before it gets ruined, and call my uncle for Ian.”

He gave me a confused look. “Why your uncle?”

“He’s a chiropractor.”

He nodded. “I like that idea.”

Colby pulled him up and passed me the container of plaster. “Get this backstage before it becomes completely useless, change your costume so it doesn’t get ruined like the last one, and then get out here so we can at least do ‘All I Ask of You’.”

I did as he said, returning just as the chords began. He hugged me as he began singing in his fantastic tenor, hooked up to his microphone for a test run.

“N _o more talk of darkness. Forget these wide-eyed fears. I’m here, with you, beside you, to guard you and to guide you. Let me be your freedom_ _, let daylight dry your tears, I’m here. Nothing can harm you. Your fears are far behind you.”_

I got the first note of the first phrase out. “ _Say_ -” There was a squeal from the mics, a deep humming, and a spark sound from a speaker, followed finally by the sparks coming from the speaker.

“Mayu!” I yelled to the box impatiently, unhooking my mic.

“Blew a speaker, sorry!”

I sighed and turned to Colby. “Why does a perfect week always lead into everything going wrong?”

As thought on cue, there was a shattering noise above us as a hammer and shards of glass landed dead center stage with tinkling sounds and a heavy thud.

“You all okay up there?” I asked.

A shocked Billy looked over the little side railing. “Yeah… I was fixing the ladder so Duncan can run around up here… the hammer flew out of my hands… and hit one of the lights…”

“Well come on and clean this up. We’ll just have to practice in the pit until this gets fixed.”

Colby gave me a look. “Murder is never the answer.”

“Today it may just be.” I turned to the cast. “If you don’t get ready to run ‘I’ll Muto/ Poor Fool He Makes Me Laugh’ right now in the pit, I may just use your skin for a new football. While it’s still attached to you.”

This got them moving. They did surprisingly well, but I could only guess that that was because they were supposed to look totally panicked and unorganized. When we finished with Andrew pretending to be dead on the floor, I smiled at them.

“That actually wasn’t terrible!” I laughed. “You guys done good!”

They all laughed and chattered. That was the best compliment they had gotten from me thus far.

Ian, limping from his encounter with Jo half an hour before, walked over and motioned me up to the stage. “Do you have those sketches of the staircase and the diagram for how it’ssupposed to separate?”

I smiled even wider. “You’re starting the ‘Masquerade’ staircase! I can’t wait to see it! Let me grab them!” I grandé jettéd to my book bag and withdrew the sketches. I waved them at Ian, and was about to run to him, until…

“Look out!” Billy yelled from the second story wings at the top of his lungs.

Ian jumped off the stage with a second to spare as a row of lights fell exactly where he had been standing.

As Colby tried not to laugh, I sighed and yelled to the cast, “We’re done for today! Everyone leave before you are impaled on a chair or something! And you,” I said to Colby, “stop laughing.”

He settled for a chuckle every few words. “Wouldn’t you know? Have a perfect quiet week,and then end up with a sick Phantom, a broken light, a destroyed row of lights, a hole in the stage, a blown out speaker, a torn curtain, a broken lamp, two ruined costumes, and a nearly dead stage crew guru.” His amusement bothered me. “What else could go wrong?”

“Lux!” Mayu called nonchalantly from the balcony. “The sound boards are on fire!”

Before I could get a single word out, Colby shoved me out the door.

“I think I should go back in there-”

“You go back there, you’re liable to die. You just have that kind of luck this week.”

He was right. So I sighed, collapsed into my car, and went directly to Razzy Fresh.

Some days, the only cure is custom frozen yogurt with all the toppings. And this was definitely one of those days.

 

 I returned to school on Wednesday, having spent Tuesday laid up in bed because of food poisoning. Colby and I were equally pissed when we went to Wilkes’ room to sleep first period.

“I am never eating at Razzy Fresh again,” I said murderously.

“Yes you are.” He knew me so well.

“Well, yeah, I am, but I’m never putting honey on my frozen yogurt ever again.” I groaned and made a pillow out of my jacket. “Who knew honey could make us so sick?”

Colby squeezed his eyes shut and waved at me. “Please don’t. I just got over the vomiting this morning. I don’t need to relive it.”

Wilkes walked in and looked at the both of us, half-asleep on her floor. “To what do I owe this honor?” She asked sarcastically. “I thought you had gym,” she said, pointing at me, “and you had Physics,” she pointed at Colby.

“Not today,” I said. “We’re fighting something.”

“Flu?”

“The curse of the Scottish Play.”

As a theatre person, Wilkes’ eyes grew wide. “No!”

“Yes.”

“Who was stupid enough to say The Name in the auditorium?” Even in her English I class, it was always called The Scottish Play.

“A freshman who doesn’t take this seriously enough.” I chugged some water, waiting to let it settle. “And we made the mistake of going to Razzy Fresh yesterday and just happened to eat poisoned honey on our yogurt.”

She rolled her eyes. “It couldn’t be that you both happened to be sick at the same time?”

Colby sat up. “By the way, we need a new sound board. There was a fire caused by a blown out microphone on Monday.”

Wilkes looked numb. “You’re kidding.”

“Hell no,” we both said.

It didn’t get better from there, and I said so before rehearsal a week later.

“We know,” was the general agreement from everyone in Starbucks.

“I had another stage crew host drop out of the fashion show,” Lux said with a sigh. “That takes us down to three.”

“Somehow all the teachers are still in,” Mayu told me, “but we’re down to two female and three male models.”

“Two of the stores called to say that they’re out,” Colby said, “and they’re sorry for any inconvenience.”

“And the people at the bookstore sent me an e-mail,” said Duncan. “They have to withdraw their donation for the Chinese auction. Apparently they’re bankrupt and going out of business.”

I slammed my head against the table a few times.

“Now that we’ve got that taken care of,” Duncan said, grabbing my forehead to keep me from further brain damage, “I think we have some serious issues to address.”

“The murder of Freshie?” I asked.

“Talking to a connection about that, but no. I think we need to figure out some kind ofexorcism performed on the auditorium if we’re ever going to get out of this total catastrophe Freshie got us into.”

We considered that. “I don’t think they’re licensed to perform exorcisms on high schools,” Colby mused. “There may be some kind of law against that.”

“Ghost Hunters?” Lux suggested. “Or someone who knows stuff like that?”

Mayu chugged her second frapachino. “Maybe we should have a caffeine fueled séance!”

We all stared at her.

“You know! Sit in the middle of the stage, talk to the ghost, and ask it to leave us alone!” She smiled. “Like when you say ‘Bloody Mary’ into a mirror three times and see her appear behind you with those creepy red eyes?”

We exchanged glances. There was a general air of confusion around.

“Did Mayu just have a good idea while on a caffeine high?” Colby asked.

I nodded. “I think she did.”

Lux gripped my arm. “Cassie, I’m scared.”

Duncan smiled widely. “I think I may just have a plan.”

 

Wilkes’ face was priceless. “You want to what?”

“Take an hour in the middle of practice as soon as it gets dark to hold a séance on the stage so maybe we can get rid of the ghosts that Freshie called when he said the name of the Scottish Play.” I smiled. “He said the name of the play twice and only did the half-assed reverse curse once, so some of the ghosts are probably still here.”

She didn’t seem to look very ecstatic at the ideas. “I don’t know which part of that disturbs me more.”

“For me it’s the idea of all the ghosts,” Mayu said. “Séances are good for getting rid of them.”

“Or just talking to them.” Lux smiled. “And once we talk to them, we can ask them to go away!”

She sighed. “What will this séance require?”

“Total darkness and a candle. And the full cooperation of everyone involved.”

She sank into her chair. “I can’t let you do that with the whole cast. It’s absurd and takes too much rehearsal time. Did you ever think that maybe you just have really bad streaks of luck that all combined to give you a really bad week?”

We all looked at each other and shrugged. “But what if it is the ghosts?” Mayu asked mysteriously.

“How about this,” Duncan proposed. “What if we go down there right now and eradicate the ghosts before rehearsal even starts?”

Wilkes gave us an exasperated look and sighed. “Why not?” she asked, throwing her hands up. “It’s not like you’ll leave it alone if I say no.”

“Yes!” Mayu, Lux, and I jumped and high fived.

I settled into my wheelie chair and thought for a second. “Does anyone know how to have a séance?”

 

We bolted to the auditorium as soon as we’d gotten instructions on séances from the internet. I rummaged backstage for a candle, oddly enough finding one in a box marked ‘skeleton pieces’. Colby, the one who had done the research on the séances, instructed everyone to sit in a circle as he spread out a white cloth that Lux had found in the middle and lit the thick taper candle. He joined the circle and sat quietly. He nodded at me.

“This is the legend of the Scottish play,” I began quietly. “It began with the original production. And Billy Shakespeare makes a huge screw up. Depending on whom you ask, he did something specific to piss off a coven of witches. He may have included one of their spells as the actual text. He could have stolen a cauldron to use as an actual prop. One way or another, he got them mad, and they put a curse on the play. The very night it began, the actor playing MacB stabbed himself with a dagger that was put in place of the prop. Now, every time the name of the play is said, a ghost of a witch comes back and causes mischief.

“Don’t call me crazy, this whole week is proof. And today we’re going to get rid of these witches.” I smiled at Colby. “Take it away.”

“Ghosts of this theater,” he said quietly, “we would consider it the greatest honor if you would join us now around this circle.” He paused. “Please? We just want to talk to you.”

The candle flickered without a breeze in the entire school.

“Hey, great to see you,” he said cheerfully. “Come sit with us.”

There was another flicker.

“Are you mad at us?” I asked. “Did Freshie offend you by saying the name of the play?”

Nothing happened.

“The Scottish Play?”

Flicker. Flicker. And the flame flared up three times its original size.

“I’m going to take that as a ‘yes’,” Duncan muttered. “How can we get rid of you?”

The flame flickered and grew smaller by just a little bit. And a little bit more. It continued for several minutes until suddenly the candle light went out.

We were all silent.

“Well, thank you!” I yelled. “That was anti-climactic.”

Lux flipped the lights on. “Is it over?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Couldn’t that just have been because this school is ridiculously drafty?

Colby cleared away the candle with a shrug and a smile. “I guess there’s only one way to find out.”

 

Duncan took his place on the stage a few days later. He would have been wearing his tux and cape, but it wasn’t finished; instead, he wore his giant wide brim hat and gym clothes. The gondola had been built over the weekend, supervised by myself, and only the usual minor stage crew calamities occurred. But it was very possible that the ghost was just waiting, biding her time until we were really ready to go all-out.

I sat in the front of the gondola, careful to avoid getting my old lacy dress caught on any un-sanded wood. I looked up at him. “You ready for this?”

He nodded. “I think I am.”

The accompaniment started and smoke slowly filled the stage. I began singing. “ _In sleep he sang to me, in dreams he came; that voice which calls to me and speaks my name. And do I dream again, for now I find, the Phantom of the Opera is there inside my mind_ _?_ ”

So far so good. My mic was still intact, no speakers had blown out, and nothing had fallen from the heavens just yet. Ian began the remote control and steered the gondola on stage as Duncan began singing. “ _Sing once again with me, our strange duet. My power over you grows stronger yet. And though you turn from me to glance behind, the Phantom of the Opera is there inside your mind._ ”

We weren’t driving off the stage yet, so I was relaxing a little. “ _Those who have seen your face draw back in fear. I am the mask you wear-_ ”

“ _It’s me they hear_ _._ ”

We began singing together, the same words except for the pronouns. “ _Your spirit and my voice in one combine._ ”

“ _The Phantom of the Opera is there inside you_ _mind_.”

Some of our chorus members came onstage and, come show time, would be in silver outfits, holding silver candles and dancing swirls in the smoke around us; however, at that point in time, only the candlestick props were complete. “ _He’s there, the Phantom of the Opera. Beware, the Phantom of the Opera.”_

Duncan stepped out of the boat and carried me to a small platform that had rolled onstage, set with a piano, and set me down by the small fence. “I _n all your fantasies_ _, you always knew the man and mystery-”_

_“Were both in you?”_

_“And in this labyrinth where night is blind,” we sang together, “the Phantom of the Opera is there inside your mind.”_

“Sing, my angel of music,” he said, leering a little.

_“_ _He’s there, the Phantom of the Opera_.” I began a series of vocal runs while he egged me on, going higher and higher until I held my final high E6, making sure to turn off my mic to avoid any electrical damage.

The music stopped. We stopped. The world had stopped.

And nothing had been broken. We all started cheering and jumping around.

“I can’t believe it!” I giggled to Duncan as he picked me up in a hug. “Nothing went wrong! The ghost is gone!”

“You go, Christine!” He said, spinning me once before putting me down again. I ran to hug Lux, who was waiting in the wings, when I heard a sickening ‘snap’. I tripped and went down, terrified that I may have snapped a bone in my leg. Taking a closer look, I realized that my shoe had had its heel snapped off.

“Damn it!” I yelled. “I don’t believe it! These are my favorite shoes!”

Duncan and Colby laughed as they helped me up. “Face it, Cass,” Colby said, struggling not to laugh. “This is musical theatre. Something is always going to go wrong.”

“Ghosts or not,” Duncan added with a chuckle. “You should know that by now.”

I smiled. I did know that. And let’s face it, what’s theatre without a little bit of disaster to keep things lively?

 


	4. Act III: Your Own Thing

Before I knew it, we’d flown through winter break and it was January. The first week back at schoolsucked  _ass_ , as usual. I hit my head against my locker door a few times between classes, wonder how I’d gone from New York and  _Chicago_  to this dream-murdering netherworld in such a few short days. The building was freezing since most of the heaters no longer worked (those that did, worked only inoverdrive), so I pulled my peacoat a little tighter around me and adjusted my fingerless gloves. My phone told me that it was, in fact, only 10:30ish, and there were still five hours to go, four of which I intended to spend cozying up to Wilkes’ coffee machine. I grabbed my plastic to-go mug, stared at the disastrous reflection that was my face and hair in my locker mirror, and ticked off another day on my calendar countdown to graduation.

 As I turned to face the rest of the day, I heard yells of ‘watch it!’ and ‘get out of my way!’ and ‘bitch I will cut you!’ move progressively closer, along with the frantic sound of footsteps. “CASSIEEEEEE!” Colby yelled as he bolted down the hallway, knocking into people and stepping on various shoes (an act sometimes punishable by attempted murder at Allderdice).

I closed my locker and sighed as he skidded to a halt next to me. “What-?”

“Check your phone!”

Indulging his crazy, I did. “What am I looking for?”

“A text message from me! Why didn’t you answer?”

“Because I don’t have a text message from you?”

He paused for a second, confused, and looked at his phone. “Huh. I guess it wasn’t delivered. It’s that damn AT&T network; I don’t get any coverage in this school!”

I rolled my eyes and started walking towards Wilkes’ room. “Right. Now what were you having a panic attack about?”

“Oh yeah.” He jumped in front of me. “They announced the date of the talent show!”

I rolled my eyes again. “Whoopee.”

The talent show was a half-hearted attempt at highlighting the school’s variety of talent; in the end, however, it was only means to display the chorus teacher’s favorite students and award one of them with a gift card. I would have entered before, and I’m sure I would have won, but rehearsals were always the same week as rehearsals for the Gene Kelly Awards- and since our musicals were so amazing, I was at those rehearsals ever year. And just to top it off, the talent show was always the same day as the Kelly Awards live show at the Benedum. I had a suspicion tucked into the back of my head that Barbie, the chorus teacher, had intentionally worked things this way; she had never really liked me.

“We’re way to busy. And there’s no way we’re going to do Phantom without getting at least half the nominations.” I stepped around him, but he caught me ahead and danced me into Wilkes’ room. “What on earth are you doing?”

Wilkes raised an eyebrow, silently asking the same question. He ignored me for a minute to continue dancing. I shook my head and sighed.

"I’m sorry; I need more coffee before I can deal with this. It’s too early.”

“The talent show is January 30!” he said triumphantly as I filled my cup. “And you’re going to signup!”

I raised a quizzical eyebrow. “You don’t say?” I situated myself at a desk and began my Spanish homework. “I’m sorry, Cheese Boy, I’m just not interested. It’s time to get serious about this musical.”

“Cheese Boy?”

“Yeah, like Colby Jack cheese?”

“Don’t call me Cheese Boy.” He pulled up the wheelie chair and sat in front of me with a smug smile. “Lia is entering.”

My head snapped up so fast I expected it to start rolling on the floor. “The Lia?”

“The Lia.”

Aliya Levinson was the one person I truly despised in all the walls of Allderdice- and trust me, there are a lot of people to dislike and a lot of reasons to dislike them. She, like me, was a senior, but she was alsoa pretentious, entitled, conceited bitch. We clashed our freshman year over gym class when I hit a tennis ball that got her square in her back; she insists to this day that it was intentional, that I hit her in the face, and that I broke her nose, while I swear on the bible that it was an accident that her nose has always looked that crooked and misshapen. Worst of all, she had won the talent show two years previous, and thought this was a reason to hold herself on a mile high pedestal.

“She can’t win again, can she?”

“Au contraire, Cassandra. She just can’t win two years in a row. You know who won last year?”

I racked my brain. “Um, Todd, right? The four foot senior break dancer in the drum line?”

He nodded. “He was also the winner our freshman year. As long as there is a year in between winning, it’s Kosher.”

“So no shellfish?” Duncan asked as he walked in, handing a halfheartedly foraged hall pass to Wilkes, who paid no attention as she threw it in the trash. He shrugged. “I don’t know, I heard Kosher, so I assumed we were talking food.”

Colby filled him in on the talent show.

“You’re doing it,” Duncan said simply.

“What? Why?”

“Because Lia needs knocked off that high horse of hers. It’s all the better if you do it.” He rolled his eyes. “I have Chem 2 with her and in her mind, she can do no wrong. I vote we either show her who’sboss or throw her into the kimono dragon pen at the zoo. One way or another, something will be done.”

“But I don’t want to!”

“Come on, Cass!” Colby began pouting. “I’ll even enter with you!”

“You already entered, didn’t you?”

“That is irrelevant!” He hit his hand on my desk. “I’m going to get you to agree to this if it is the last thing I do!”

“You already signed me up, didn’t you?” I asked with a sigh.

“Also irrelevant!”

"Actually, completely relevant,” Duncan muttered in a stage whisper.

“You signed up, isn’t that enough?”

“I signed up as incentive to get you to sign up!”

“Cassie, why are you so against this?” Wilkes unexpectedly asked without looking up from her computer. “Every year you say something to the effect of ‘why don’t they have the talent show when I can actually be in it’. This is your chance.”

She was right, of course, but I’d be damned before I’d admit it. “Look, now that it’s actually here, we should face the facts that I’m a Broadway Babe and there’s no way I’m winning with a show tune. I don’t even sing any pop!”

“You drive home every day blasting ‘Airplanes’ and Katy Perry and singing at the top of your lungs,” Duncan said with a sigh. “Cassandra: we all know that we could argue this back and forth for ages, but in the end we will convince you and you will sing in that talent show. So let’s cut out the middleman and just figure out what song you’re singing, deal? And don’t,” he added, “say that you don’t know anynon-cliché non-musical songs. You have four solid hours of dance songs on your iPod, and I have heard every single one of them over the course of dance warm-ups.”

I sighed. “Why, what were you thinking?”

At the exact same time, the boys began pacing opposite each other. “Something good,” Colby muttered, mostly to himself. “Dramatic, but not mushy.”

“Movie song?” Duncan asked. “What about ‘My Heart Will Go On?”

I choked out a laugh. “You have got to be kidding. First, get a dictionary and look up ‘unreasonably overdone songs’ and tell me when you find that as the definition. Second, I will never sing any song that endorses that movie. I sat there for two freaking hours waiting for the damn boat to sink, and that bastard James Cameron made a movie about a damn love story! No,” I said calmly, “and I’m tempted to punch you for suggesting it.”

“Oh! ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’!” Colby said with an excited snap.

“I thought we were going to avoid clichés?”

Duncan did a small hop. “I’ve got it! ‘Singing in the Rain’! You can tap dance and sing and it’ll be awesome!”

“Can’t,” Colby and I said at the same time.

“It’s a dude who sings it,” I said before Colby could. “And I can’t compare to Gene Kelly.”

“Sure you can! We dress you up in a pinstripe suit, throw in a hat-”

“She could,” Colby said, “except that’s the song I signed up to do.”

We stared at him. “You can tap dance?” Duncan asked, his eyebrows darting into his hairline in surprise. “Since when?”

“Since he played Albert in  _Bye Bye Birdie_ when we were freshmen,” I answered for him. “Why did you do that? How long have you been planning that?”

“I don’t know; it just came to me!”

“You know and/or can create choreography for ‘Singing in the Rain’ on your own?”

“Okay, no, but I was hoping you would help me with that.”

I glared at him.

“We were talking about you, anyways. And I think we’re thinking too formally. You need pop. And piano, so you can play it.”

“Piano pop?” I giggled. “That sounds as bad as bubble gum pop.”

He scoffed. “You know what I mean. Like that song ‘A Thousand Miles’?”

“The Vanessa Carlton song?”

“Yeah that one.”

Duncan got wide-eyed suddenly. “That’s it! That’s your song! ‘A Thousand Miles’!”

I rolled my eyes at him. “That song is so overdone. Don’t get me wrong, I love it. It’s amazing and one of the best non-musical songs I’ve ever heard, but it was released in 2001. Between then and now, it’s become so overdone.”

Duncan sighed. “You’re right. I still hear it on the radio all the time.”

But Colby had an idea. “Wilkes, can we use your computer?”

“No, I have freshmen coming in here in three minutes; you guys can’t be taking over my desk!”

“Can we use one of the computers in the back of the room?”

“Go ahead.”

He ran ahead of us and began booting up a computer. “I think I have an idea!” he said. “But I want to check your YouTube Channel to make sure it’s a good idea.”

I nodded while we waited five minutes for the ten-year-old Dell to reach running condition. It took another few minutes for Colby to work his way through the school-created firewall- not because it was sophisticated, just because the computer was even slower than the internet. He found my channel as the bell rang and the sound of freshmen filling the room began.

“Remember this song?” he asked as the video began buffering.

“Yeah, ‘White Houses’, I love this song. Also Vanessa Carlton. You should remember it as well as I do, you were in this video. We drove down to Cal U,” I said, filling Duncan in, “last summer and filmed this.”

Duncan nodded as he watched the video. In it, I sang and walked on the dorm sidewalks on a dark cloudy day while the various scenes I was singing about played out on the grass around me. He smiled when it was finished. “That was good. That was really good.”

“Thanks. Personally, I think the original video was underdone. It had so much potential that wasn’t used. Anyway, what’s the point in this?”

“That’s it! That’s your song!”

I sighed, but secretly had to admit he had a point. It was a song that people could relate to, had a background orchestral part that would put the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra to shame, and was entirely too underrated by the majority of the musical community.

“This is really a dancing song, isn’t it? I mean, that’s half the song is about dancing. Should I dance, too?”

They both gave me a horrified look. “You can’t be serious,” Duncan said. “I’m sorry, you’re good, but you’re not good enough to do your own piano accompaniment and dance.”

It only took a second for me to realize, grudgingly, he was right. “Good point. She couldn’t even do it in the music video; she needed two of her.”

Colby nudged me with smile creeping on his face. “Are you going to do it? Huh? Huh? Huh?”

I sighed and smiled. “I guess I’m going to do it.”

“Awesome!” Duncan said with a fist pump. He ran into the front of the room. “She’s doing it, Wilkes!”

I saw the freshmen stare at him as Wilkes rolled her eyes. “That’s great to hear, Duncan. What does this have to do with my lesson on ‘Joy Luck Club’?”

“Nothing!” He turned to the students, who were fascinated by the easy-going interaction of teacher and senior student. “All you need to know is that this school’s entire curriculum is ‘I am a poor/abused/unrecognized/underappreciated woman from an ethnic minority, feel sorry for me.’”

Wilkes sighed. “If you corrupt my freshmen the way you’ve corrupted your own educations, I’ll knock your block off.”

“It’s only a matter of time, Wilkes,” he said with a laugh and a shrug as he walked out of the room. “Only a matter of time.”

 

“How’d it go?” I asked Colby. It was the day of auditions, Phantom rehearsal was being held in the cafeteria, and he was leaving the auditorium, his tap shoes clicking with every step he took.

“It was great! I’m in!” He sat on the floor, trading the tap shoes for sneakers. “You ready?”

“I will be; I still have fifteen minutes.”

He looked around the hallway, which was empty. “Yeah, I’m sure all these invisible people have a ton of talents that need plenty of time to audition.”

I shrugged. “I’m okay with it. I don’t even sweat auditions anymore. Maybe the judges just need time to deliberate.”

“Could be. What are you so focused on?”

“Angry Birds.”

“Of course. You sure you’re okay driving me home?”

“You mean take a half mile detour? I think-“

A loud ‘bang’ from a door cut me off. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lia leaving the stairwell. She stopped when she saw us slouched against the wall.

“Oh, Cassandra! I didn’t know you’d be here!” She laughed, high pitched and bird like, her hot pink nails flailing around a CD that was hooked on her pinkie, drawling so that she pronounced my name as ‘Ca-sawn-dra’. “I thought your musical was going on!”

I didn’t even look up from my iPod. “Uh-huh. You must have an eviler twin, because I could have sworn I saw someone who looked exactly like you, right down to the neon nails, staring the signup sheet down as if it was going to start turning cartwheels. I’m sure she could have told you I’d be here.”

She scoffed, so high pitched that only dolphins could hear, turned on her high heels, and clicked into the auditorium. It was eerily reminiscent of Antigone.

“She’s going to murder you some day,” Colby muttered.

“She’ll get over it.”

He rolled his eyes. “You sure you’re ready?”

“I know this music backwards and forwards, don’t worry about it.”

He watched my game over my shoulder as we waited in silence until Lia came clicking through the hall again.

“You’re up, Cassandra,” she said with an evil smile. “Good luck.”

“Thanks. I would have told you to break a leg, but I’d be too tempted to do it myself.”

“Oh, so it’s not enough that you broke my nose?”

“Lia, for hell’s sake, that was four years ago, I didn’t break your nose, but I wish god I had, and your nose has always been that crooked and misshapen and maybe you should just shut up and get some surgery to fix it.”

She strutted away quickly and indignantly. Colby smiled.

“When you get out of there, I’m buying you coffee, and lots of it.”

I sent him a cute smile, walked in and up to the stage, and addressed the teachers who were acting as deciding judges. There was Barbie Blackwell, the chorus teacher, Davis, my gym teacher (if you remember) that I hadn’t seen in a few weeks, and The Good Doctor, my English teacher who was slumped in his chair texting, obviously here against his will.

“Hi, everyone,” I said as I pushed the piano on the stage. “I’m singing ‘White Houses’ by Vanessa Carlton.”

Barbie looked up at me over the rim of her bright red glasses. “You’re supposed to state your name.”

“Between the three of you, over the course of the past four years, I’ve had you all a total of nine semesters, plus musical rehearsals in the chorus room. Do you really need me to tell you my name?”

“Yes.”

“Cassie.” I pulled a chair onstage, took a breath, and sang through my song. When I was done, I looked up. Davis was smiling, The Good Doctor was smiling- well, as close as I’d ever seen him really get to a smile- and Barbie stared at me disapprovingly over the glasses.

“I’m sorry, no.”

I felt my eyebrows fly up, my jaw drop down, and my eyes bulge out a little. “I’m sorry?”

“It’s not that you’re not good enough; you’re very good. But you can’t sing that song.”

I stomped my foot. “Well why the bloody hell not?”

She raised an eyebrow.

“I mean, ‘Well why not?’”

“That song has sexual implications, discusses underage drinking, references an eating disorder, and I don’t want something so risqué in this show.”

I stared, my jaw inching lower to the ground. “You have a dance crew that dresses like they’re going to work the street corners as soon as they’re done; someone singing ‘Lady Marmalade’- a song that blatantly asks ‘will you go to bed with me tonight’ in the least subtle way possible while detailing a rendezvous with a French hooker; and last year you had a duet where the singers might as well have stripped down and gone at it on the stage. How is this possibly ‘risqué’?”

Davis and The Good Doctor looked at her, obviously wondering this themselves. She ignored their looks and stared only at me, an evil smirk playing at her lips and a dark glint in her eye.

“I’m not saying you can’t be in this show, Cassandra, I’m just saying that this song is inappropriate. If you’d like to pick a different song and re-audition for me tomorrow, I’ll be happy to let you. You’re obviously very talented, and I’d hate to lose you as a performer, but I can’t allow a song that so blatantly addresses losing one’s virginity to be performed.”

I took a few breaths to steady myself. “If you would like, I have another song that I have written that might be more appealing to you that I could sing right now.”

“I would very much appreciate it,” she said with a smile that clearly indicated she would not appreciate it in the slightest.

I took another minute, played out ‘I Remember’, a song I had written two years previously, and turned on the piano bench to be torn apart again.

Barbie only nodded. “Yes, I think that will be sufficient.”

“I’ll be playing it on guitar during the show, but I guess I was unprepared.”

“That will be fine. We’ll see you at rehearsals.”

I had intended to tell her that, due to Phantom rehearsals, I wouldn’t be making all the talent show meetings, but this seems like a bad time to tell her. I nodded politely to Davis and The Good Doctor, sent Barbie a sarcastic smile and mental middle finger, and strut out of the room. Colby was waiting for me anxiously.

“What happened?” he asked. “You were in there twice as long as anyone else!”

I stomped my foot again, disappointed I didn’t have any paper to throw down. “Barbie nixed ‘White Houses’! She said it was inappropriate and risqué!”

His faces showed the same reaction as mine. “You’re kidding! You’re not in?”

“Oh, I’m in alright; she okayed ‘I Remember’. Tell me, how is a song about unrequited love more appropriate than ‘White Houses’?”

 “I think you’re dissing your own song.”

“I don’t care!” I dug my keys out of my pocket and walked off in a huff, Colby began struggling to match my strides. “That was the perfect song! And my only real chance at beating Lia! You know that if Lia had been the one to sing that, it would have been approved in a second!”

“Cass, this whole show is presenting Barbie’s favorites, of which Lia is one. You knew this from the get go. Lia can get away with anything.”

I let out a frustrated muffled scream and flung the door open. “Barbie can suck my-”

“Cassie!”

“What? She can! I’m not going to be nice about this! She’s a terrible person who plays politics to get what she wants instead of actually recognizing talent!”

“Cass!”

“Don’t tell me to be modest,” I said loudly as I flung open my car door. “I’m royally pissed right now.” I hit my head off the steering wheel. “Okay, that was a bad idea.” I held my head in my hands. “This whole talent show was a bad idea.”

“Cassandra Hathaway.”

I looked up at him. He was smirking, standing next to the door, holding it open.

“Yes, Colby?”

“I get that you’re upset, and I know you want to go punch something, but you’re forgetting an important fact: you’re Christine.”

I took a breath and let that sink in. “You know what, you’re right. No matter what Barbie says about my song, I know I’m good, and I can win this thing, just like I got Christine’s part.”

He smiled gently. “No, I mean, you’re supposed to be Christine. Right now. In the cafeteria. In rehearsal. Duncan just texted me when he heard your lovely booming voice and said that Wilkes wants to see us run the scene in the graveyard.”

I blinked. “Rehearsal?”

“Rehearsal.”

“Right.” I stood up, locked the car, and made my way back to the doors. “By the way, I liked that a whole lot more when it was a motivational speech.”

“And it was a wonderful one,” he said with a smirk. “You took the words right out of my mouth.”

 

“ARGH!” I let out a frustrated scream as I slammed my bedroom door. It squealed as it opened slowly and Duncan, Colby, Lux and Mayu walked in behind me.

“I think she’s mad,” Mayu said, going to cower in a corner. 

“I’m damn well pissed!” I punched the wall over my desk. “OW! I should not have done that!”

Lux pretended to check her watch. “Yup, right on time for a breakdown.

Duncan sat me down, trying his hardest to not chuckle. “Cassie, if you keep this up, you’re going to seriously hurt yourself. Now, weren’t you the one who told me that this is just a chance for Barbie to showcase her favorites?”

“Maybe.”

“Which means ‘yes’ in Cassie-speak? So why are you so mad about this? You knew it would happen.”

I jumped up, sending him jumping back and falling onto my bed. “I expected to have to work twice as hard to get into the show. I expected to have to work my ass off to get Barbie to have a higher opinion of me than Lia. I expected and prepared for the possibility of resorting to blackmail. But I didn’t think that bitch would ruin my plans by calling my song ‘risqué and inappropriate’!” I slumped in my chair. “That’s just uncalled for.”

Colby dug my guitar out from my closet and passed it to me. “Play the song she made you sing.”

I sighed and obliged. But when I was finished, I could tell none of them were as impressed with it as they had been with ‘White Houses’.

“You hate it, don’t you?”

Lux shook her head frantically. “No! That’s one of my favorite songs of yours! But, well, it just doesn’t hit the same chords as the other one.”

“It’s a love song,” Mayu said seriously. “And you hate love songs!”

“And I’m sorry,” Duncan said simply, “but there’s no way you can beat Lia with that.”

I picked the guitar up by the neck, ready to smash it, but Colby grabbed it before I got the chance. “You’d regret that later.”

“Probably.” I fell back on the bed. “What am I supposed to do? I want to win this thing!”

Mayu curled up next to me like a cat, using me for a pillow. “You rehearse! Cassie is the best singer in the whole city and we all know it! So you rehearse and make it so there’s no way Lia can beat you!” She jumped up and struck a rock star pose. “And I will make a full blown accompaniment recording that is the greatest in all the land!”

I thought for a second, my breathing and blood pressure slowly going down. “That would be kind of awesome. I’ve never written more than the guitar accompaniment.”

She began jumping. “And I can make drums, bass, and piano, and whatever else you want! And it’ll be really, really, really cool!”

I smiled. “Mayu is being serious. And supportive. This is pretty cool.”

“This is supportive and serious?” Duncan asked with a raised eyebrow.

“For Mayu it is.”

Lux perked up a little. “You know, we could come up with some pretty cool light designs for you. I mean, if you want something a little splashy.” She walked over to my closet. “And I bet I could come up with some kind of really good outfit. Like, maybe a little punkish?”

I nodded with a small smile. “That actually sounds really cool.”

Duncan shrugged with a thoughtful look. “I don’t know, I guess I could come up with something.”

“Record the harmonies for me?”

“That’ll do.”

Colby sighed. “I want to help you. And I would offer every possible service to you. However, I am driving myself insane trying to match the Gene Kelly choreography for ‘Singing in the Rain’ step for step.”

I poked him repeatedly in the sides with a small giggle. “You can’t handle it! You can’t handle it! You can’t handle it!”

He pushed my hands away with a chuckle. “I can so handle it; it’s just a lot more than I thought when I originally took it on.”

“Don’t go slacking on your Phantom duties now, Raoul.” I gave him one last poke before jumping to my laptop and opening an old sound bit of ‘I Remember’.

“This coming from the girl who tried to leave rehearsal two hours early yesterday!”

“It seemed justified in my rage.”

“And you went back as soon as you realize, I know.” He shook his head and looked at his watch. “While you guys enjoy your fun of planning to take down Lia, I’ve got to go. If I eat dinner fast enough, I can get some tap practice in before the parents get home.”

“Bye,” we all said with half-hearted waves, no one looking up from their projects.

And for several days, that was how we stayed. Each of them tackled their promises with full force, me hovering over their shoulders with my suggestions being blatantly ignored, until we were convinced we had something perfect. We finally piled it all into the auditorium the Friday before the show, ready to rehearse full out. It was a good feeling, getting ready to see all our work laid out in front of us, knowing that it was going to kick ass.

And not just any ass. It was going to kick Lia’s ass, hopefully far enough away that I’d never have to hear her screechy little bird voice again.

But until that point when such an act of god would occur, I would have to just deal with the torment, I thought as I watched Satan’s Mistress herself strut into our rehearsal space.

“Oh, look how cute!” she declared, setting off a thumping migraine in my head in exactly eight seconds flat. “Cassandra’s all dressed up and ready to go!” She giggled a little, leaning against the stage. “You’re just so adorable! I can’t get over it!”

I wondered how adorable she would find me if I used my new platform boots to break her fingers.

“Thank you, Aliya,” Duncan said graciously from where he was setting up a light. “That’s high praise, coming from you.” He shot me a look. “Isn’t it, Cassie?”

I gave him a look. “I’m not going to pretend to be civil with her, are you crazy? I’m already stopping myself from burning her face off; I don’t think I can do much more.”

Lia took a slightly terrified step back.

Lux rolled her eyes, taking a break from her job of assisting Duncan. “And you wonder why people call you anti-social.”

“Here I thought it was because I hate people. My mistake.”

“She doesn’t mean it,” Lux said with a fake smile to Lia.

“Yes I do!”

“Yes she does!”

I sighed again as I got a look from Lux. “Since you’re here, I’m assuming there’s something I can help you with?”

She stepped back under the stage lights and smiled. “Oh, no! I just heard you guys were here for the day and I wanted to see what I was up against!”

I shrugged. “Whatever. Just don’t ruin anything.” I shielded my eyes to look up at Mayu, who was goofing off in her tech booth. “How’s it going up there?”

She responded by yelling, “Soo-weeeet!” at the top of her lungs, which I took to mean ‘good’.

Lux took a second to give my hair a once-over, having spent hours on end learning to style it to turn it into an overly curly and messy ponytail. She pulled my neon green sweater a little farther off one shoulder, allowing me a second to pull my black miniskirt a little farther towards me knees before slapping something in my hands.

“And what, may I ask, are these?”

“Fingerless wrist gloves,” she said simply as she clipped two neon heart barrettes into my hair. “Black, to match the skirt and boots.”

I raised a quizzical eyebrow at her. “You can’t be serious.”

“Who’s the fashion addict here?”

I looked down, blushing. “You are.”

“Are you really going to question me?”

I sighed and put the gloves on, looking into the seats to see Lia smirking up at me. I was completely ready to make another sarcastic remark to her, but Duncan passed me my guitar and stopped me.

“Do this now,” he muttered, “blow her away, make her nervous, and then tell her about how you plan to make Sweeney Todd’s pies out of her.”

I scoffed and rolled my eyes. “They were Mrs. Lovett’s meat pies. Shows what you know.”

He chuckled as he walked off the stage, taking the ladder with him. I walked to my amp, plugged the guitar in, and ran a few chords before pointing up to Mayu. “Hit it!”

In all actuality, I was the one who started. I strummed out a few chords and went to the mic. 

_“I remember… how I used to stare. And I remember… her blue eyes and blonde hair. You were always telling her things I wanted to hear.”_

Mayu started her CD, and the drums started over the speakers. “ _Don’t you realize that I’m right in front of you? Don’t you see me? Can’t you hear me? I’m trying to talk to you. Could it be I’m invisible to you? Maybe you’re blind; or do you see right through me?_

_“Always on the side, always in the dark; it always tore my world apart. I fell for your face, I fell for the lie. Now I know why, and I remember the day.”_

The bass and piano launched as the second verse began. Somehow, through magic I can’t quite understand, Mayu had developed an ear for accompaniment, and her music was as good as my guitar. Lux’s lights started sweeping and changing across the stage, timed perfectly with the music.

_“I would fantasize you and me forever; I would analyze you and me together. Now you’re gone, and you’ve left me behind. It’s all I can do to get you out of my mind._

_“Always on the side, always in the dark. It always tore my world apart. I fell for your face, I fell for the lie. Now I know why, and I remember the day.”_

I risked a glance at Lia. She sat, legs crossed, in the center of the first row, her chin rested on folded hands. Her face revealed nothing except what could have been a nervous glimmer in her eyes. Or at least, I hoped it was a nervous glimmer.

“Looking back I wonder why I didn’t see somehow; I’m digging deeper when I should be climbing my way out. There was a time, but now I think I’ll turn my life around!

_“And you were always on my mind; yeah, you were always there…”_

I brought the beat up one more time with the lights having a full out panic attack and I couldn’t help but smile. “ _Always on the side, always in the dark. It always tore my world apart. I fell for your face, I fell for the lie. Now I know why, and I remember the day. And I remember the day- and I remember the day.”_

Mayu’s drums hit one more beat, the bass one last chord, and the piano one last note, so that all that was left was my electric guitar ringing out its chords.

_“I remember how I used to stare, and I remember her blue eyes and blonde hair._

_“And I was always… watching you.”_

My friends did their best to create crazy applause as Lux’s lights faded to darkness. Mayu cued the house lights up so I could see them all smiling. I was unsurprised to hear sarcastic slow clapping coming from Lia’s seat. She continued it as she slowly strutted her way to the apron of the stage and stared at me, an evil smirk on her face.

“That was just so adorable,” she said simply. “I mean, how cute was that?”

I rolled my eyes. “So I’m curious, what could possibly make the Ruler of All Things Evil come and watch this rehearsal, for which her time has clearly been wasted while her presence serves no purpose?”

She smiled charmingly. “Oh, believe me, it’s nothing! I always check out my competition. Although,” she said with a little scoff, “saying that does make me wonder why I’m here.”

I rolled my eyes again, a motion that I was doing so much I was beginning to get motion sick. “Well, you came, you saw; now scram before I have to come up with another creative way to torture you.”

She held up a finger with a sickeningly pink nail. “Just a second.” She made a show of digging through her purse until she held up a CD. “Could you be a dear and deliver this to Mayu?”

I was torn between snapping the CD in her face and actually doing what she asked. Curiosity won me over. “Give that to me,” I muttered as I snatched it out of her hands, jumped off the stage, and strode to the balcony with a scowl on my face. Mayu was eagerly awaiting me, hands outstretched and eyes wide.

“If you want, I can program this to give her a hard drive-crashing virus if she puts it in her computer,” she said aside as she began running the music.

I listened to the auto-tuned music that had started playing. “That’s a bad idea; she’d know it was us. Why does this sound familiar?”

She listened with me. “I don’t know. But you’re right.”

Once Lia started singing, we figured out why.

_“Making my way downtown, walking fast, faces pass and I’m home bound.”_  My jaw dropped as I realized I had refused to sing that exact same song, and that she wasn’t nearly as awful as I’d let myself think she was.  _“Staring blankly ahead, just making my way, making my way through the crowd.”_  Mayu and I exchanged a horrified glace, both of us obviously mentally screaming. “ _Cause I need you, and I miss you, and now I wonder:_

_“If I could fall into the sky, do you think time would pass me by? Cause you know I’d walk a thousand miles if I could just see you… tonight.”_

“This is bad,” I said frantically. “This is really, really bad. I thought she was horrible. Like, ‘stab yourself in the eardrum with a screwdriver’ bad.”

“She did win two years ago,” Mayu muttered. “I guess I just always guessed that was Barbie threatening the other judges with, like, complete and utter mutilation if they voted against her. But apparently there was actually a little talent involved.”

I sunk back further into the seat. “This is so bad. This song is good enough to have been on the radio for nine years. There’s no way I’m going to be able to beat this with a stupid little home-written love song!” I continued to glare at the stage until Lia was done singing.

“If you want your damn CD back, you’d better come up here and get it yourself,” I yelled over the balcony edge.

She flashed a smile. “No, that’s okay! You guys can keep it! I don’t want to, like, have my hard drive crash or something.”

“Damn,” I muttered as she sauntered out.

Lux and Duncan looked up from the stage.

And just because I apparently couldn’t tell for myself, Duncan yelled up to us, “So! We’re screwed!”

 

“Your turn, Lux,” Colby said as he tossed a gummy bear into her open mouth. “Who would play you in the movie about your life?”

She thought for little more than a second before she smiled. “Meryl Streep.”

Duncan laughed and shoveled a handful of chips into his mouth. “She’s like sixty!”

“You never said there were age limits.”

“I guess I didn’t,” Colby sighed. 

“Besides, she’s my most favorite person in the universe. If I had a choice between having an hour lunch with Meryl Streep and a chance at immortality and position as Queen of the Universe, I would choose lunch with Meryl Streep.”

“If you were Queen of the Universe, couldn’t you just order her to have lunch with you?”

“Mayu!” Lux called as she ignored him, tossing a bag of cookies to Mayu in her spinning chair. “How about you?”

She dumped half the bag in her mouth before answering. “Morgan Freeman!” she managed to yell through the crunch of Famous Amos.

Jo choked on her Cup-O-Noodles. “You want a seventy-year-old black man to play you in the movie about your life?” She paused to wrinkle her nose. “I think broth just went up my nose.”

I passed her a Kleenex as Mayu nodded vigorously.

“Why?” Colby asked, holding back a laugh.

“It’s Morgan Freeman,” Mayu said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Are you saying you wouldn’t want him to play in your biopic?”

They were considering her perfectly valid point when Wilkes walked in, stopping in the doorway to stare. “What in the name of God almighty have you done to my room?”

I looked over my shoulder; we had four bags of chips, a few empty cups of Cup-O-Noodles strewn about, a random assortment of pop cans, an empty bag of neon gummy worms from my breakfast, a mostly empty jar of peanut butter, and a completely decimated jar of Nutella next to an empty bag of sugar cookies. 

“I’m offended!” Colby said in mock-tragedy. “You make it seem like this is the Dematerialized Zone or something.”

“It sure looks like it!”

Duncan shrugged. “We’re eating lunch!”

“Your lunch period was an hour and a half ago!”

“Which is why we’re so glad we have you, Wilkes.”

She cocked her head in Jo’s direction. “How did you get hot soup?”

Jo slurped a noodle before smiling. “The Good Doctor hates people, so he put a microwave in his room instead of actually interacting with his colleagues in the faculty lounge.”

“So why does he let you use it?”

“’Cause I brought eight microwaveable noodles and gave him two.”

“You bribed a teacher?”

Mayu laughed. “Our lack of shame is astounding!”

Jo shrugged. “We needed something to cheer Cassie up.”

They looked at me for the first time, slumped in a desk and sulking. I hadn’t been in a good mood for days, and despite the caffeine and sugar, my mood was not improving.

“Lia?” Wilkes asked as she brushed a pop can into the garbage.

I nodded. “I could kick her.”

“She’s threatened to be depressed until the talent show is over,” Jo added.

“I have an unquenchable drive to win doubled with a desire for my song to be heard.” I sighed heavily. “There’s nothing inappropriate about it! All it does is tell the truth. That’s what high school is like!” I jumped up and began pacing. “You make friends and loose them; you fight and let little things get between you. You don’t know what love is, so you let yourself believe that whatever you have is love. You go out dancing, drink underage, and make stupid mistakes. Shit happens and you regret it, but that’s what makes you you. Barbie needs to grow a pair, realize that life isn’t all sunshine and Santa Claus, and get over it.”

I turned to see my remarkably surprised friends staring at me. Jo set down her cup. “I didn’t know you were this serious.”

“Have you been listening to a word I’ve said this entire week?”

She shook her head. “You wanted to win; you never actually gave us a reason more than superficial. You just wanted to kick Lia’s ass to kingdom come.”

“Well, I mean, that’s what it started as-”

“And then this just became your personal vendetta against a teacher-”

“I wouldn’t call it a vendetta-”

“But you have a real reason and passion behind this, and that changes everything.”

I had to stop and stare. “What does that mean?”

“I know a band,” she said with a mischievous smile. “A good band. They’re a little punk, but they learn music faster than anyone I know. And if you want them, they can learn your music and be ready for Friday.”

I blinked a few times. “That’s impossible. Barbie will stop them in their tracks.”

“Have you ever seen how many people are backstage during this thing? One extra band will never be noticed.”

My mouth dropped. “Are you saying you have a plan?”

She smiled a typically horrific Jo smile. “I’m saying I have a plan.”

 

When the talent show finally came around, I was pacing backstage, having a panic attack.

“I’m so getting expelled,” I muttered to Lux, who was in the process of styling the guitarist.

She chuckled. “You can’t get expelled for this. Disqualified, yes, but we’ve discussed this several times this past week. You’re going to be fine, and this is going to be the best performance this talent show has ever seen.”

She was right, of course, in every way. My friends had made it abundantly clear that, despite this performance being incredible, Barbie was going to kick my ass so far out of the show that no one would see me until next century. I knew this, I had accepted this, but this was no longer about winning.

“I have to prove that this song is what people need to hear,” I muttered, pulling on my new boots. “This is what really happens in high school, and it is risqué and inappropriate and Barbie just needs to get over herself.”

Lux turned around, giving me a new pair of barrettes to clip into my tall pigtails as she spoke. “Who are you trying to convince? Because you’ve had me convinced for a long time.” She looked at the barrettes and immediately fixed them. “And this is all worked out, so you can’t back out now.”

I nodded. “Right. I’m convinced. I think.” I sighed. “And there’s no way she can stop this?”

Lux laughed. “We might as well have erected a barricade with all the people we have in on this. There is no way Barbie can stop you without killing eighty percent of the people backstage.”

“Right.” I calmed myself with a few breaths and watched the guitarist tune up. “Is your band all here?”

He nodded without even looking up.

Lux sighed. “Mister Talkative over here and his band are all styled and ready, just like you.”

“Styled. Right, if you say so.” I tugged at the collar of the red turtleneck she had stuck me in. “I’m sweating like crazy. Maybe this was a bad idea.”

Both Lux and Guitar Guy rolled their eyes. It was something I had said an uncountable number of times thus far. Instead of having a panic attack, I turned my attention to the people around me. There were singers, strippers masquerading as a dance crew, a step group trying to figure out the best place to smoke, and me and the band.

“Where’s Colby?” I asked. “Now that I think of it, I haven’t seen him outside of school for practically two weeks.”

Lux thought for a second. “You know, you’re right. And other than a text message a few nights ago when he asked when Singing in the Rain was set, I haven’t heard very much out of him, either.”

He unintentionally answered our question at that very moment, walking into the room as if he owned it. I felt my jaw drop and a wide smile take over.

“Damn, Cheese Boy!” I said with a giggle, getting up to walk around him. “You look hot. Well, in an old way.”

He smirked. “Thanks. I think.” He pulled at his suit jacked. “I feel pretty spiffy.” And he really did look it. True to the times, he wore a grey pinstripe suit and matching fedora, a black umbrella tucked under his arm. His tap shoes were tied by the laces and strung around his neck, a shining black contrast to his worn and dirty sneakers that currently graced his feet. “Found it all at Goodwill. I mean, I had to go to like seven different stores to find it everything, but I did it!” It was only then I noted the slight color contrasts in the dyes and the thread-bareness to the fedora; hardly noticeable up close, it would be impossible to see from the audience.

Lux nodded approvingly. “This will work. You’re going to be great.”

He scoffed with a smile. “Oh please. Tell me something I don’t know.” He looked around. “I guess you’re all set?”

I took a nervous deep breath as an answer. Lux rolled her eyes. “We’re all ready. The mastermind behind the plan is not, however. This is really inconvenient, because she’s the one who has to get onstage without having a panic attack.”

Colby rolled his eyes and shrugged at the same time before tossing a long black trench coat and cap to Lux. “I need you to walk on and stare at me while wearing that when I start tapping and spinning in circles.”

She shrugged. “I’ve seen the video a million times with this freak,” she said with a point to me. “I think I’ll figure it out.” She pulled the coat on and stared at him. “You do realize how poorly this fits, right? I’m drowning in it.”

He waved a hand at her and walked away, leaving her to stare at me.

“I don’t even get an option in this, do I?”

I shook my head. “Not at all.” I spun once on my toes, testing the boots. “Okay, so I’m pretty sure I’m physically incapable of killing myself whilst wearing these.”

“Whilst?”

“Just go with it.”

She shook her head. “I still think you would have looked better in those stiletto boots.”

“Yay, suicide!” I muttered. “Besides, they weren’t the right color.”

“Speaking of color,” she said, pulling out a makeup pallet, “get over here so I can make you shmexy.”

“And you’re asking me about my vocabulary?” I took advantage of the moment she used to roll her eyes and bolted out of the room. “This is so not what I signed up for,” I muttered as I rounded the corner, promptly walking into Lia.

“Watch it!” she snarled before looking up. When she saw it was me, she smiled sweetly. “Aw, Cassandra! You changed your outfit! Did my comments offend you that much?”

“You don’t have nearly that much of an effect on me,” I said with an exasperated sigh. “You want to know why it changed, ask my stylist. Honestly Lia, I don’t have time for your passive aggressive taunts and creepy doll smiles that are eerily reminiscent of Chucky.”

She smirked. “Charming.” Her purple heels clicked as she walked into the dressing room. She wore a tight, one-shoulder, long sleeved dress that just barely covered her ass, also in a bright purple. Her earrings were purple feathers, and she had streaked her blonde hair with even blonder strands. It was sickeningly stereotypical of a part-time hooker, which I didn’t doubt she was.

I rolled my eyes, sent a fairly passionate middle finger at her back, turned to go again, and immediately walked into Barbie.

“Ah, Cassandra,” she said with a slight sneer. “You look lovely.”

“Thanks,” I said, using all my willpower to stop myself from flipping her off as well. “I did my best to keep it appropriate enough for you, unlike a bleached blonde bimbo in the dressing room who shall remain nameless but is wearing a shit-ton of purple.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“I mean a ton of purple.”

She ignored me, as people have a tendency to do, and walked into the dressing room. I sighed and made my way to the balcony, where Duncan and Mayu waited.

“Slut alert!” Mayu yelled with a giggle.

I raised an eyebrow. “Are you talking about me?”

Duncan rolled his eyes. “She’s talking about Lia. We were wondering if the lights are going to be hot enough to melt off the body paint she’s calling a dress.”

I considered it. “Maybe if we’re lucky?”

He chuckled, and then looked me up and down. “Not bad, sexy. What’re you doing here?”

“I don’t go on until the end of Act Two,” I mumbled. “I think Barbie did it to try to sabotage my act so that the judges decide they like someone else before they see me. Mind if I watch with you guys?”

They didn’t, of course, and I watched as Mayu did her thing until music came over the speakers and patrons came in- I say patrons, but I mean rowdy high school students with nothing better to do on a Saturday night. My stomach knotted as the seats filled, the lights dimmed, and the show started half an hour later.

“And here goes nothing,” Mayu announced.

The show went as you’d expect for most of the first; there were wolf whistles, there was poor dancing, there was poor singing, and everyone went insane for every act. Mayu and Duncan were kind enough to ‘boo’ Lia’s act with me, but the general response was horrifically better than I had hoped.

“Trip and break your face, trip and break your face,” I said quietly as we watched her saunter offstage.

“Now, Cassie, be nice,” Duncan said just as quietly. “If she breaks her nose again, I don’t think there’s a doctor on the planet that will be able to make it normal.”

This was enough to make me smile for the first time all night. Then, to make me smile even more, Colby’s act was next. The music started before he did; he walked onstage, by far the most well dressed person we’d seen that night, and waved to an invisible person in the wings. He put up his umbrella, making sure to point it at the floor to counter the bad luck it could bring as he opened it.

“ _Doo-d’loo-doo-doo-doo, doo-d’loo-doo-doo-doo-doo!_ ” He sang, taking small skips across the stage, his umbrella held above him. “ _Doo-d’loo-doo-doo-doo-doo. Doo-d’loo-doo-doo-doo-doo!_ ” He stopped, held his umbrella down, and shrugged with a wide smile.

“ _I’m singing in the rain,”_  he sang as he walked around the stage, folding up his umbrella, “ _just singing in the rain! What a glorious feeling’, I’m happy again!”_  He did a funny little jump and acted as if he was hanging onto a lamppost, doing an amazing job at defying gravity. “ _I’m laughing at clouds so dark up above! The sun’s in my heart and I’m ready for love!_

“ _Let the stormy clouds chase everyone from the place!_ ” He sang as he started complicated little skips. “ _Come on with the rain, I’ve a smile on my face! I walk down the lane with a happy refrain! Just singin’, singin’ in the rain!”_

Now he started tapping a little, dancing with his umbrella. “ _Dancin’ in the rain! Dee-ah dee-ah! Dee-ah dee-ah dee-ah dee-ah!” More taps. “I’m happy again! I’m singin’ and dancin’ in the rain!”_

Then, I’ll never know where it came from, but Colby began an incredible tap dance that would have made Gene Kelly proud. Here was a guy who had never taken a dance class before in his life, tapping to one of the most famous songs people know. He giggled and laughed and ‘splashed’ and made everyone just feel great. He danced and tapped as if he had done it his entire life. The audience laughed as he made a mess of the pretend puddles at his feet, throwing the umbrella up and catching it, balancing on imaginary sidewalks and curbs.

Just as he was making the most of the mess, Lux walked on, almost lost in the oversized black police coat, and stared sternly at him. He froze mid-spin. Duncan took a moment to kick the water off his pants legs, trying to regain his composure. After a second, he looked at Lux with a smile.

“ _I’m dancin’,” he sang, “and singin’ in the rain…_ ”

And with that, he all but skipped off, and intermission began to thunderous cheers.

 

I was waiting backstage for my cue the next time I saw my best friend. I practically tackled him.

“That was freaking amazing!” I almost yelled in his ear. “Where did you learn to do that? I didn’t know you had any ability even remotely like that!”

Colby chuckled. “Always the tone of surprise. I studied that movie clip non-stop for like a week straight. And I have the blisters to prove it,” he added with a mutter as he gingerly switched his weight from one foot to the other. “You guys ready?”

I looked out onstage where the last group was clearing off and took a breath. “Yes.”

I made my way onstage with a final pull at my miniskirt, grabbing the microphone as it sat in its stand. “Hi, everyone,” I said into it, looking towards the back of the auditorium. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m making a quick change to the program. This is a very important song to me, and I hope it means equally as much to you.” I turned and saw the keyboard player had pushed the piano into the lights and was looking at me expectantly. I nodded to him, and he tapped out five even quarter notes.

I launched into the song, holding tight to the microphone stand as Keyboard Player’s hands began racing across the piano. “ _Crashed on the floor when I moved in, this little bungalow with some strange new friends. Stay up too late, and I’m too thin; we promised each other it’s ‘til the end-”_

Drums kicked in, which meant that Drum Dude had snuck onstage from through the black curtains and taken his place at the perpetually set up drum set. “ _Now we’re spinning empty bottles, it’s the five of us with pretty-eyed boys girls die to trust. I can’t resist the day- no I can’t resist the day!”_

The bass player began as he walked out, followed by Mr. Talkative on the guitar with his portable amp clipped to his belt, pulling out the notes as long and prettily as he could; the orchestral parts called for a violinist, but we hadn’t been able to find one. “And Jenny screams out, and it’s no pose, ‘cause when she dances she goes and goes! And beer through the nose on an inside joke, and I’m so excited I haven’t spoken.

“ _And she’s so pretty and she’s so sure; maybe I’m more clever than a girl like her. Summer is all in bloom; and summer is ending soon…”_

I felt the music taking over and smiled. “ _It’s alright! And it’s nice not to be so alone; but I hold on to secrets in white houses-”_

I tapped four notes with the heel of my boot and smiled to Keyboard Player before launching back into the song.

“ _Maybe I’m a little bit over my head; I come undone at the things he says. And he’s so funny in his bright red shirt; we were all in love, and we all got hurt. I sneak into his car’s cracked leather seats, the smell of gasoline in the summer heat; boy, we’re going way too fast, it’s all too sweet to last-_

_“It’s alright. And I put myself in his hands, but I hold on to secrets in white houses- Love. Oh, something ignites in my veins, and I pray it never fades in white houses…”_

The notes began to draw out and I risked a glance at Barbie: she sat at the judges table, a smirk on her face that was completely unexpected and out of character. Then I realized this was exactly what she wanted; she was perfectly happy to have a reason to disqualify me. The other judges were smiling and nodding, completely unaware of Barbie’s intentions and absolute power; they were not the same ones from the audition, and I had no idea who they were, but they seemed to be enjoying themselves.

_“My first time… hard to explain. Rush of blood and a little bit off pain. And on a cloudy day, well it’s more common than you’d think. He’s my first… mistake…”_

I let the word hang in the air as Drum Dude and Mr. Talkative faded out, leaving only Keyboard Player and me. The music slowed as the meaning sunk deeper; I’d heard this song a million times and it still tore at me, so I could only hope the audience had the same feeling.

_“Maybe you were all faster than me; we gave each other up so easily. These silly little wounds will never mend; I feel so far from where I’ve been._

“ _So I go,_ ” I sang simply as the beat and accompaniment picked up again. “ _And I will not be back here again. I’m gone as the day is fading on white houses. I lie; put my injuries all in the dust. In my heart, it’s the five of us in white houses. And you, maybe you’ll remember me; what I gave is yours to keep in white houses._

_“In white houses._

_“In white houses.”_

I emerged backstage with a massive smile that faded quickly as I saw one of Barbie’s assistants hovering backstage. I gave him a pained expression. “Disqualified?”

He nodded with an equally pained look. “Disqualified.”

I sighed and shrugged with a smile. “You know what? That’s okay. I did what I wanted and what I felt like I had to do.” I couldn’t help but giggle. “And I finally did the talent show!”

Someone jumped on my back. “That was awesome!” Lux’s voice said from somewhere in my hair. “And you look awesome!”

“Complementing our own work now, are we?” I chuckled as I carried her piggyback to the wings to watch the traditional dance-off as the judges deliberated.

“I’m surprised you don’t just want to leave,” Lux muttered as I dropped her.

I chuckled again. “I’m going to stay here and watch the winners, and then I’m going to be so gracious and polite when I congratulate Lia that she’s going to be afraid for her life for the next month and a half!”

Lux though for a second. “Why am I totally not surprised that that’s something you’d do?”

“’Cause I’m a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad person?”

“Whatever you say, Alexander. I can’t believe your goldfish memory can actually remember that book. You read that like ten years ago, but you can’t remember what you had for lunch?”

“Exactly!” I winced as I watched Todd the break-dancer do a flip off of one of our two-story set pieces. “Why must they do that every single year?”

“Cause it’s stupid and dangerous? And if they break something, it becomes our problem?”

“Probably.”

Mayu turned the music down as Barbie took the stage with an official looking clipboard in her hands. “The judges have debated, and we’ve come to a decision.” She motioned to the wings for all the acts to join her, which we did. “First, I would like to address a concern of the judges: Cassandra Hathaway was the forerunner for first place.” She said it with complete and obvious disdain on her face and a sneer on her lips. “However, because of an unapproved change in her performance, we are forced to disqualify her act.”

While a few people in the audience booed, Barbie stood with a content grin and Lia stared at me with an arrogant smile plastered on her face. I smiled back without the least bit of sarcasm on my face. She resumed looking at Barbie, a little thrown off.

“However, at the insistence of my co-judges, it has been decided that she should at least earn an honorable mention.” She was trying to make it clear that it was not, in any what shape or form, her decision to give me any mark of distinction. Much to her displeasure, this seemed to bring a decent round of applause. 

“Continuing,” she spoke over the clapping, “in third place, the Taylor Allderdice Improv Club!”

There was cheering for the club who’d entertained everyone with games straight out of Whose Line is it Anyway; they were very good, in complete honesty.

“In second place, the Allderdice High School Dance Team!”

The group had looked like a seizure set to music, as they usually did, but I clapped politely anyways.

“And finally, in a nearly unanimous decision, this year’s winner is…” She paused for dramatic effect. Lia fluffed her hair.

“Colby Tatum!”

My head whipped so fast that my neck nearly broke; Colby was standing next to me with the most unbelieving and excited face I’d ever seen on him. He walked up to accept the prize, laughing all the way. I smiled and clapped before turning to Lia.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said mournfully before smiling at her completely confused expression. With that, I ran to the front of the stage and practically tackled Colby, who laughed as I hung on his back. “Taking me to Uncle Sam’s and buying me food with that prize money, right Cheese Boy?”

He laughed. “That’s Mister First Place Cheese Boy to you!”

 

Uncle Sam’s was packed, as expected; most of the people from the talent show had packed in to feast on French fries and the legendary sweet potato fries. My friends and I forced ourselves around a table only meant to seat two, piled plates on top of themselves, and began mixing the traditional dipping sauce as we chatted lively.

“More mayonnaise!” Mayu declared, pouring two packets onto the extra plate. I chuckled and added more barbeque sauce to make it even. “You can’t do that! We need more salt in this!” To demonstrate, she added another several packets of ketchup. “Much better!”

Duncan eyed the concoction with a cautious look and hesitant hand. “I don’t know if this is entirely safe to eat.”

“Are you kidding? Of course it’s not.” Despite this, Colby grabbed a handful of fries and ate each of them completely saturated in the stuff, punctuating each fry with a thoughtful sentence. “Eating this will give you a heart attack. This is everything that is wrong with America. One bite will give you diabetes. There is nothing in this except fat and salt. McDonald’s has nothing on this. You will clog your arteries and die an early death.” He sighed as he finished the handful. “But god, that is the most amazing thing I have ever tasted.”

We all laughed. I felt someone tap my shoulder and turned, sure it was going to be someone ready to kick us out, but found a vaguely familiar face.

“Oh, good, I was hoping it was you!” she laughed, her brown curls bouncing. Her name escaped me; we’d had class together a year before, but I was totally blanking. “Sorry, it’s just

67

that everyone looks the same from behind.”

“Yeah, no kidding-”

“Hey, Nat!” Colby apparently knew her; he waved and totally saved my ass. “I didn’t know you were here!”

She waved. “Yeah, I was at the talent show and a bunch of us were hungry. Awesome act, by the way.”

Colby blushed and devoured several more fries, mumbling his thanks.

“Anyway, Cassie, do you think I could talk to you for a minute?”

I nodded and we walked outside. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, it’s great actually.” She stopped, obviously thinking, probably not sure how to continue. “That song you sang. It was great.”

“Thanks.” I shivered; tomorrow it would be February, and it was a horrible time to decide to leave my coat in the restaurant, even if I was wearing a turtleneck.  “I don’t mean to sound rude or anything, but is this going to take very long? I’m going to freeze my persimmons off.”

“Persimmons?”

“I’m trying to cut down on the swearing.”

“Right.” She took a breath. “I don’t know how to say this exactly. But that song really meant something. And I know Mrs. Blackwell tried to stop you from singing it, and that singing it got you disqualified, but I’m really glad that you did it anyways.” Another breath. “I bet you know what people say about me.”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times while I racked my brains. “I don’t know if I’m sorry or happy to say that I have no idea what you mean.”

“Oh.” She bit her lip. “Um, I believe it involves words like ‘slut’, ‘whore’, ‘skank’, ‘floozy’, ‘tramp’, ‘harlot’-”

“I think I can get the picture.”

“Yeah, that’s the gist. But it’s just… it’s not true. And a lot of what you sang reminded me of that. And that it’s not my fault. Bad things happen, and I’m not the only one that has had it happen. And… yeah.” She stood awkwardly for a second. “So thank you. I just wanted you to know that.”

I smiled. “Thanks. That really means a lot.” An icy wind blew down the street; we stopped to shiver for a second. “I should go. There’s warm fries inside and I think my fingers just turned into icicles.”

She laughed as we walked inside, waving goodbye and going back to our respective tables. Duncan looked up as I sat down, a mayonnaise/barbeque combination smudged on his face and fries shoved in his mouth. He tried to say something, but it came out as muffled nothingness.

“Try that one more time,” I instructed, “this time without the fries.”

He gulped. “What was that about?”

I could only smile. “Nat just wanted to talk. To tell me that she liked the show.” I took a fry and examined it, beaming internally. “She just wanted me to know that the whole thing was worth it.”


	5. Act IV: A Hatful of Snow

February 5, 2010 began like almost any other winter day in Pittsburgh. It was cold, it was dark, it was early, and Mayu and I were skipping gym in Wilkes’ room, taking advantage of her coffee pot and discussing the tour of I _n the Heights_  that was playing at the Benedum downtown.

“Hello, ladies!” Colby said as he walked in, throwing a mass of belongings in his chair. “The Good Doctor sends his greetings.”

“It amazes me that you three are still passing your classes,” Wilkes said as she typed out an email. “It’s like you never leave my room. You’d never see any of my freshmen doing that.”

Mayu looked up from her drawing on the chalkboard to laugh. “They’re freshmen! They’re too terrified to skip classes! Besides, I passed your English I class,” she muttered as she returned to her drawing.

“It’s a testament to the quality of education here at lovely old Taylor Allderdice,” I said over the brim of my coffee cup. “Wilkes, take this down and ZZ it to all of the administration: there has been an intense outbreak of senioritis amongst the student population, and has caused some infection in the staff as well. Nothing can be done. Sincerely, a student who no longer gives a rat’s arse.”

“What about a rat’s ass?” Duncan asked as he walked in. Wilkes gave another obligatory roll of her eyes.

“Arse. I’m trying to cut down on the foul language. Well, generally accepted American foul language.” I smiled at Wilkes. “Now ZZ that shit and make it official!”

“ZZ?” Duncan asked.

“The Allderdice version of ‘reply all’.”

“Normalcy is too over done for this administration,” Colby explained.

“The administration is a bunch of hipsters,” Mayu added as she drew a ferret. “It’s better if no one’s ever heard of it. On a side note, who is attending ‘Punch a Hipster Day’?”

Duncan had been in Allderdice long enough to simply accept this as a sufficient explanation and got a cup of coffee as a steady and quick sound of footsteps made its way to the room.

Lux ran in the room frantically, her hair a windblown mess and her many layered skirt kicked up to her waist in some places. Her impeccable Uggs were no longer tan, but muddy with layers of melting road salt that was slowly drying in crusty white waves. Her book bag was still half-open from going through security, and looked like it had been dropped several times.

She took a deep breath, adjusting her skirt. “There is a spider,” she finally said, “in my car.”

Lux was, and always has been, scared of spiders.

Colby got up, trying not to laugh, and grabbed his coat. “I’ll get it,” he said, moving to the door. “Wilkes, can you write me a pass?”

Wilkes rolled her eyes, but obliged. “Which lot are you parked in, Lux?” She asked, rummaging for a pen.

“Beachwood.”

We all looked at her. “Beachwood?” Wilkes repeated. “There’s no parking lot on Beachwood. Do you mean the one near the baseball field?”

Lux fixed her hair, refusing to look us in the eyes as she rearranged the blonde spikes. “No. My car is at the intersection of Beachwood and Forbes. The spider fell from the ceiling when I hit a bump in the road; I screamed, pulled over, left it there on the dashboard, and ran here.”

Colby did the math in his head. “That’s a mile away.”

Lux wasn’t just scared of spiders. Lux was terrified of spiders.

I looked at her favorite boots. “Lux, why is there salt on your favorite boots?”

“Cause I just ran a mile?”

“Well, obviously. There’s no snow outside, though.”

Wilkes laughed. “For now! We’re supposed to get a storm tonight. The city is anticipating up to four inches! They must be pre-salting the roads.” She shook her head. “This is going to be worse than I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of snow.”

“Yeah, no kidding. Weren’t you the one who invented fire during the ice age?”

She stared at me.

“I’m saying you’re old.

“I get that.”

“Does it have to keep snowing?” Mayu asked, now working on drawing a scone for her ferret to go with its cup of coffee. “It’s February. The novelty of this snow wore off, like, three seconds after Christmas.”

“You’re living in the wrong place,” Colby said, putting his coat back in his unorganized pile. “Try California.”

“Why are you sitting down?” Lux asked, becoming frantic again. “That spider is still in my car!”

“Your car is a mile away!”

“I just ran that far, so can you!

“And the spider will still be there after school!”

“Exactly!” she shrieked. “That means it’ll have time to put its nasty spider legs all over everything!”

“Lux, it’s probably been over everything twice by now.”

Her face went blank and pale as she sat back in a chair. “I think I have to burn my car.”

Duncan rolled his eyes. “Hey Cass? Instead of going straight to your house for a costume fitting, can we stop at Lux’s car so that we can kill the spider?”

“Of course we can! But I am getting nowhere near that little bastard!”

“Problem solved, Lux,” he said simply as Mayu began jumping up and down, waving her hands. “Yes, Mayu?”

“I want to come too! It sounds like a party! A spider killing party!” She gasped excitedly. “Can I have a crossbow?”

“You can come with us, or you can have a crossbow, but you can’t have both at the same time.”

She shrugged. “I can deal with that. I’m in.”

 

The fourth time my tires slid on the way home I started to panic.

“Cass?” Duncan asked from my backseat. “Why is it all uphill to your house?”

I did not have an answer for that. The pre-salting that the city had attempted was failing. Doing our best to avoid dramatic hills, we had already taken an extra ten minutes, trying to get up the shortest hill that would pass my house and lead us to Lux’s car.

“It’s only been snowing for like two hours, how did it get this bad?” Lux asked, gripping the Oh Shit Handle until her knuckles were ghostly white.

“It’s Pittsburgh, what do you expect?” I asked through clenched teeth. “I think there’s going to be a change of plans.”

“Agreed!” a chorus of voices said.

“We’re going to my house, and Lux and Colby can go kill the spider, then Lux can go home, and Colby can come back to my house until the roads clear.”

“I’m not going out in this!” Lux and Colby said at the same time.

“That spider can have spider babies in the back seat for all I care,” Lux said, “but it’s too damn cold and slippery to be walking around in Uggs and a skirt.”

Everyone stared at the silent Colby. “I’m just not suicidal, sorry.”

I sighed. “Fine. Look, we’re almost there, we’ll have hot chocolate, we’ll go through our massive DVD library, we’ll make a fun night of it. The plows will be out by tonight, I guarantee it, and then tomorrow we can go have a bonfire of Lux’s car.”

Mayu threw her hands up as she cheered. “YAY! Fire!”

“Okay, so I lied about the snow plows.”

Duncan rolled his eyes before drinking his hot chocolate. “No shit.” 

Mayu laughed as she stuck another marshmallow on her metal stick and stuck it right in the flames flickering in our fireplace. “At least I got my fire! And we can have another one tomorrow with Lux’s car!”

I looked at Lux, whose face was stoic and solid. “The only thing that is making me feel better is that at least that damn spider will freeze to death tonight.”

“Everything is going to freeze tonight.” We looked up to see Antigone walking in the room. “We’re at like fourteen inches right now. And it’s just going to keep going tonight.”

Duncan’s eyes grew wide. “We’re not going home tonight. Or tomorrow. Are we?”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“Theoretically I could walk home,” Colby said with a shrug.

“Theoretically?” Duncan asked.

 “Well, yeah. My parents are stuck downtown at work and I forgot my key.”

“Do we have enough food to survive with this many people in our house?” I asked.

“Probably. I mean, it’s only two more than usual, since we’re always ready for Leo and Horatio.” Antigone thought for a moment as she watched Mayu make a seven-layer s’more. “Okay, even if we count Mayu as two people, we still should be fine.”

“Thank you for taking that into consideration,” Mayu said through sticky chocolate and marshmallows. “Where are we going to sleep?”

“We can clear out the boys’ rooms; it’s not like they’re coming home any time soon.”

“I call Lux!” Mayu yelled as she dove on to a truly startled Lux’s lap. “We will be roomies!”

“Lovely,” Lux mumbled; it seemed he had had the wind knocked out of her.

I could almost see Duncan’s ears perk up. “So, what does that mean for me and Colby?”

“You’re going to have to room together.”

They exchanged horrified looks before looking to me. “Please tell me there’s more than one bed.”

All the females in the room laughed loudly. “Oh, please,” Lux said. “When you two are married, your wives have to be more worried about you leaving them for each other instead of other women!”

The looked at each other again and shrugged. “This is also true.”

“We’ll be fine,” Duncan said with a nod.

We chugged hot chocolate, roasted marshmallows, and began going through the ‘A’s in our DVD library. Somewhere around Amélie, I found I’d fallen asleep on the couch, my knitting had come half-undone, and I was only watching bits and pieces of the endless strain of movies as I drifted in and out of sleep. Someone managed to stay awake- Mayu, based on the number of empty Mountain Dew cans- and switch the disks each time a movie ended. 

I awoke at one point to find everyone in the room- except, as I had assumed, Mayu- jumping awake as the doorbell rang for the second time. Lux sent me a horrified glance.

“I think there is a mass murderer at your door.”

“Yeah, right.” I rolled my eyes, but nonetheless waited for my mom at the bottom of the stairs. “I think there’s a mass murderer at our door,” I whispered as she finished tying her robe.

She glared at me with circles under her eyes.

“Right. No murder jokes until you get coffee.”

She sighed and opened the door, and there stood my brothers; Leo waving cheerily, his face pink and body entombed in a massive parka that reached his knees, and Horatio, who was shivering violently and wearing only a leather coat, skimpy hat, and matching gloves.

“Hey all,” Leo said as he walked into the house, tossing the massive coat aside. “What a storm, huh? We really weren’t expecting this!”

Horatio took exactly four steps into the hall before promptly keeling over, still shivering.

“Horatio got stranded at the bookstore,” Leo continued, stepping over his brother as though he were nothing more than a rug, “so I offered to get him on my way home from the Waterfront, cause I had a pretty sweet date tonight, and he could stay the night with me in Oakland. However, once I got him, it was obvious that the car wasn’t actually going to make it to Oakland.”

Mom tapped her foot slightly threateningly. “So where does that mean the car is?”

Leo continued, distinctly avoiding answering the question. “So we trucked it up here, figuring there had to be at least one person snowed in!”

Horatio groaned, slowly worming his way to the fireplace, still face down on the carpet. Duncan raised an eyebrow. “And why is the eldest child of the household impersonating a slug on the foyer floor?”

“Yeah, that. Turns out Horatio didn’t believe the weather report and did not anticipate hiking a mile and a half to his parent’s house, so he only has the ridiculously un-winter-like clothes on his back.”

My brother shed the jacket to reveal a soaking wet t-shirt. My mother didn’t even look at him. “Poor baby. He’s twenty-seven years old, so it’s his own damn fault. Now answer my question: where is the car?”

From halfway up the stairs, Leo yelled, “The dear Subaru is becoming intimate friends with a tree near Mellon Park and just off 5th Avenue!” We could hear him bolt into his room as fast as he could, the door closing behind him.

Mom glared after him. “He is the only person in the city of Pittsburgh who would even consider driving down that damn hill in this damn weather. You okay Horatio?” she yelled over her shoulder.

He waved a hand as his teeth continued chattering.

“Good enough,” she mumbled before slumping up the stairs.

I chuckled quietly and went to sit next to the fire. Mayu was giggling in a maniacal way that indicated exhaustion, pointing to Lux.

“I bet they saw the spider-mobile on their way here!” she managed through hiccups of laughter. “And they didn’t even kill the arachnid inside!”

We all stared at her, obviously not finding it nearly as funny as she did since we were not nearly as high as she seemed to be. I turned to Horatio, who shivered at me.

“Soup,” he said simply, a pouty frown on his pale face. “Cassie, make me soup?”

I tilted my head and looked at him. “I’m so tempted to say no, just to see if that is enough to make you cry, but that would make me a bad sister, wouldn’t it?”

He nodded, looking genuinely painfully close to crying.

I chuckled as I got up and tossed him a blanket. “There’s a can of Mushroom Miso downstairs that I’d be willing to heat up for you, but nothing more complicated than that. We both know that I could burn the house down.”

 

“COLBY!”

I woke up the next morning, blurry and confused, to find Mayu jumping on each person’s sleeping bag and yelling.

“DUNCAN! LUX! HORATIO! CASSIE!” She giggled as I glared at her through half open eyes after she pounced on my chest. “IT SNOWED!”

“No shit.” I sat up as Mayu giggled, rolled over and landed on my brother. She pulled me by the hand over the pile of bodies, stepping on hands and fingers, giggled again as I stumbled into the wall. She pointed out the window with a smile. “Oh, shit.”

It hadn’t stopped at fourteen inches. I couldn’t tell the doghouse from the trees, the chairs from the stairs, or the yard from the street. There were vaguely familiar shapes near the house that seemed to resemble cars, but they were so far buried that I couldn’t tell which was which. I looked in the kitchen to see the dog, Anubis, sitting at the door, wining desperately. 

“This should be fun,” I muttered to him. I managed to open the back door, but the storm door refused to yield. I pushed, shoved, pulled, and struggled, and five minutes later, I had a three-inch dent in the snow and a puddle of dog piss on the floor. I looked up as Horatio walked in the kitchen; his nose wrinkled and his eyes shot straight to the puddle.

I threw up my arms in a shrug with an exasperated sigh. “Your problem now!”

He groaned. “Come on! I just woke up! I wanted waffles!”

“I made you soup last night, you owe me.” I shrugged as I got the makings for waffles and bacon out of the fridge. “And if you don’t, I may or may not have a cell phone picture of you in your pathetic state last night that I’d be more than willing to post to Facebook.”

“Where did you say the paper towels are?”

I chuckled, digging through the fridge for eggs as Mayu hopped into the kitchen. “Chocolate chips or cinnamon in the waffles?”

She hopped up and sat like a cat on the island stool. “I- I- I want chocolate and caramel and cinnamon and apples!”

I raised an eyebrow. “Why does the caramel apple cinnamon waffles sound really good?”

“’Cause they are,” Horatio answered simply from the floor, scrunching his nose.

I pointed to Leo as he walked into the kitchen. “You!”

“Me!” He struck a rock star pose for a second and continued walking. “What about me?”

“Go find apples!”

He looked outside. “I’m sorry, but I think the apple tree is out of season.”

“We don’t even have an apple tree. I mean go ask some neighbors around if they have any apples.”

“Like a creepy old lady asking for a cup of sugar?”

“Yup, you can even dress up if you want.”

He slumped into a chair next to Mayu. “I don’t want to! Why do you need apples this early anyways?”

Horatio scowled as he stood up. “She wants to make fancy waffles.”

Without another word, Leo jumped out of the chair, threw on a pair of rain boots, all but fell into a large and puffy coat, and bolted out the door. I laughed as he collided with the storm door.

“Oops.” He spend several minutes trying to force the door open as I mixed the batter, my friends lazily waking and watching. He struggled for nearly ten minutes, letting the cold air in as we shivered, before the door was opened wide enough for a person. “I am victorious!”

The front doorbell rang, which seemed to confuse Leo.

“Nice, bro,” Horatio chuckled. “We have two doors. Wouldn’t it be easier to have just gone out of the front door?” He chuckled again as Leo slumped off to answer.

Five minutes later, the first pound of bacon was fried, a plateful of five waffles was being served at the table, and Leo returned to the kitchen with three children and a handful of apples. As a table, we collectively raised our eyebrows.

“Um, I did not kidnap these children,” Leo began.

Lux’s eyes widened. “If that’s how you’re beginning, this has to be good.”

“That was Mrs. Andrade from next-door and these are her kids, Lino,” he pointed to the oldest son, “Emilio,” the middle son, “and Gisela,” the daughter and the youngest. I knew them, of course, but my friends waved cheerily. “Their power is out, and Mrs. Andrade was hoping we could watch them while she goes to check on her parents over in Oakland.”

Horatio’s eyes widened. “How does she think she’s getting to Oakland in this weather?”

“Walking, just like we did. Anyways, I said sure and she asked if there was anything we needed, and that’s how I got the apples!” He triumphantly dumped them on the counter next to the waffle iron and cutting board. “So make those waffles!”

I rolled my eyes and began cutting up the apples as another waffle cooked. “Do you and your brother and sister want some breakfast?” I asked Lino. “We’re making cinnamon waffles with apples and caramel on top.”

Lino nodded excitedly. “Can we have apple cider, too?”

Horatio laughed and got the jug out of the refrigerator, pouring some cups and heating them in the microwave. Lux smiled sweetly at Gisela, who stood next to her. “Gisela, your hair is so cute. I love your headband.”

Gisela didn’t answer, but stared blankly as my brothers and I laughed.

“What’s wrong?” She looked around panicked. “Does she not like me? Did I say something wrong?”

Leo chuckled again. “Well, you see, Lux. Mr. and Mrs. Andrade are from Brazil. And they speak almost nothing but Portuguese at home. So all the kids speak Portuguese almost exclusively, except for Lino.”

“I’m in second grade!” Lino declared proudly. “Emilio is in pre-school, so he knows a little English, but Gisela doesn’t know a lot of stuff.”

Mayu gave a wink at Emilio. “So, little man, do you know ‘high five’?” she asked as she held out her hand.

He smiled widely and hit her hand hard with a laugh.

“I like him!” she declared, pulling a stool next to her and motioning for him to sit. “Me and the little dude are going to get along great!”

Lux looked down helplessly at the adorable little girl, who had decided to cling to Duncan’s leg. “This sucks. Does anyone know Portuguese?”

We did not. But Colby’s translation app on his phone did. “Gisela, você quer café de manhã?" a robotic woman’s voice asked after he typed for a moment.

Gisela finally smiled and nodded excitedly. Lino smiled at her. “Sente-se! Cassie cozinhará para nós!” I hugged Lino as she jumped in a seat.

“Thank god we have you,” I sighed as I flipped the first waffle onto a plate. 

“Can you tell her how pretty I said she looks?” Lux asked Lino with a smile.

Unsurprisingly, at least to me, Lino sighed in heavy distress. “Do I have to? Can I just have a waffle?” When his parents weren’t around, he was often called upon to translate for his siblings, and I got the feeling it go on his nerves.

Lux stared, horrified, as Colby laughed and handed over his phone. “Use this. I thought you were always bragging about how great you are with kids.”

Lux ignored him and typed into the phone. “Gisela, voice e some net a cost cutest cue van legume pea! Compel talented adore o sue picked vested!” The cheery woman’s voice spoke with a heavy American accent, and the mistyped words hadn’t even been translated.

The kids laughed as I passed out the next batch of waffles. Lux sighed. “I give up. I can’t do Portuguese, and apparently neither can this damn app. Damn this autocorrect!” She covered her waffle in whipped cream, doused that in caramel syrup, topped it off with a handful of fried apples, and ate her sorrows away. “Colby, get a phone with a real keyboard.”

Nearby, Emilio was pulling at Mayu’s arm. “What’s going on, Little Dude?” she asked as she polished off her second waffle- I hadn’t even seen her take it, but that’s Mayu for you.

“We can play in snow!” Emilio declared with a big smile on his face and his hands thrown up. “And sleds!”

Horatio looked up over his glasses. “Do we even still have our sleds?”

I shrugged. “Sure, why not? What else is there to do today?”

“I was going to hook up the laptop to the TV and watch the Nostalgia Critic destroy my childhood all day,” Leo answered. “Which I think I’ll do anyways. You’ve got to be insane if you’re going to try tromping through this much snow on a day as cold as today.”

Duncan shrugged. “I’m in, but I have to steal clothes.”

“I think we all do,” Colby muttered as he looked down at his wrinkled shirt; he sniffed it once and wrinkled his nose.

I grabbed a set of keys from near the door and tossed them to Horatio. “You go over to the Andrade’s house and find these three their snow clothes while I find something these four can wear.”

Horatio looked up at me sadly. “But I wanted to watch That Guy with the Glasses ruin everything I once held dear!”

“You can do that, but I’d be happy to post that pathetic picture of you on Twitter.”

“Come on, munchkins,” my brother said with a sigh, jingling the keys. “Looks like we’re going to play in the snow.”

Emilio reluctantly slid from his place on Mayu’s lap, Gisela gleefully jumped into my brother’s arms (Lux sulked a little), and Lino jumped around, chattering back and forth between his siblings and my brother, switching effortlessly between Portuguese and English, a feat that left me staring after them.

“I wish I could do that,” I mumbled as I led the troops upstairs.

“You can sing in three languages,” Colby reminded me. “Or do you only pretend you know Italian and Spanish?”

“I know songs, not languages.” I pointed towards my sewing room, which had been horribly unorganized so that Leo could sleep the previous night. “You should be able to find some of my brothers’ clothes in that room. And you two,” I indicated Lux and Mayu, “will have to dig through my closet, knowing I lay claim to my Under Armor, favorite turtleneck, and those wool socks I made last year.”

Mayu seemed disappointed that she couldn’t have the socks, but they dug through without much complaint.

At least, at first they did.

Half an hour later, when Horatio stood next to me with the kids packed tight in winter wear, watching the chaos that had ensued, I came to realize that my friends were less well behaved than most children under the age of ten. Mayu had tackled Duncan for trying to take a fleece North Face sweater she wanted, and now had him hogtied with a scarf, Colby was very nearly yelling his favorite swear words at a pair of boots with the laces knotted beyond salvation, and Lux was standing nearby, grumbling at not only my poor fashion sense, but the fact that the sweater and jeans she’d salvaged neither matched nor fit correctly.

“Is she actually trying to hurt him,” Horatio asked, speaking of Mayu, “or is she just not letting him go now?”

“I think it’s just for fun now,” I said cautiously, “considering she got the sweater.” Thinking carefully, I grabbed a pair of scissors and slowly approached Colby as to not startle him. “I think I can fix this!”

He looked at me, his eyes full of horrific animosity. “I’m going to kill these damn things!” he muttered, pulling at the laces until his hands were red.

I took the scissors and cut the laces, handing him a pair of old sneakers. “Just redo them with these, okay?”

He looked like his blood pressure would never go down, but he nodded. I turned to Lux.

“I think you look pretty as always.”

She scowled. “You would; they’re your clothes.”

I rolled my eyes and walked over to Lino. “What is the word for ‘pretty’?”

He gave me a curious look. “Bonita.”

“Thanks.” A common enough word. Now I picked up Gisele, pointed slyly to Lux, and whispered the word in her ear.

“Bonita!” the girl chirped, throwing her arm out and pointing. She probably only did it because it was the first word I’d ever said to her that she understood, but it worked. Lux’s face lit up as she walked over, arms outstretched. 

“Bonita?” She giggled. “You think I look pretty?”

“See, I told you,” I mumbled, setting Gisele on the ground. “Mayu, untie him.”

She gave me a pouty face. “Do I have to?”

“Dear god, yes!” Duncan yelled, struggling to keep his head up out of a pillow.

“I’m afraid so. But you got the sweater.”

Mayu shrugged with a smile. “True enough!” she giggled as she undid the scarf; Duncan’s limbs fell limp around him.

“I can’t. Feel. Anything,” he mumbled into the pillow.

“Don’t say that,” I warned quietly, “or Mayu may be tempted to test that statement with a series of sharp objects.”

Emilio jumped away from his siblings and pulled on Mayu’s arm. “You’re not ready! Let’s play!”

It didn’t take much more prodding than that. Mayu leapt up, practically dove into a bulky pair of sweatpants, long sweater, and hoodie, then followed Emilio downstairs as she tried to hobble and put on her boots on. I followed her, reaching the bottom of the stairs as she attempted to bolt down the sidewalk with Emilio on her shoulders, cheering.

The bolting wasn’t going so well: snow was up to her thighs, and the going was slow. Even Anubis, huge dog that he was, had to swim to make each step. Lino could hardly see over the white mess, and Gisela was not going to be getting down from her piggyback ride on Horatio’s shoulders anytime soon.

“Where did you want to go sledding?” Horatio asked as I hoisted Lino onto my back.

He clapped and laughed. “Frick! Let’s go to Frick!”

I sighed a cloud of white vapor. “Of course.” Frick Park was the nearby park, the largest in the city, and its playground was famous for the most fun blue slide ever built and nearby massive hill for sledding. However, this sledding hill was more than half a mile away; on a good day, this wouldn’t be so bad, but this was Snowmageddon, and it took us nearly ten minutes to make it twenty feet off our property.

“Wait!” Mayu shouted from the back of the procession to stop us. “Where are the sleds?”

It took us another fifteen to truck it back to the house, make our way through the yard, and find the sleds in the back of the tool shed. Then, pulling the sleds behind us, the kids on our shoulders, and trudging through the snow that was still coming down in buckets, we walked the half mile in no less than an hour and a half. It was truly a remarkable feat, which left those of us above the age of seven exhausted enough to collapse almost dead in the snow.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” Emilio yelled, pulling the sled and struggling to make each step.

“I want to go first!” Lino joined in, struggling just as much as his brother was.

Gisela joined in with loud Portuguese that only her brothers could understand.

Mayu, the most hyper girl I ever met, sighed. “How can they still have so much energy? I can’t even feel my legs!”

“They didn’t have to do the walking,” Horatio grumbled.

I forced myself up. “Are you sure you guys don’t want to just make snow angels?”

They protested and pulled at my hands until I grabbed a sled.

“Dear lord. Someone help me here!” I ordered as I dragged the damn wooden contraption to the lip of the hill. I heard a quick game of rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock before Colby and Lux joined me, muttering to themselves as they grabbed their own sleds.

“Ready?” I asked when they settled, grabbing Gisela as she sat in front of me.

“Why not?” and “Whatever,” were the replies I got.

I rolled my eyes before shouting, “One! Two! Three!” and pushing off.

The sled didn’t move. I tried again; nothing. Colby and Lux were having as little success as I was. Some choice words ran through my head as I waved Duncan over. “Try pushing us down, will you?”

He crossed his arms and shook his head. “You guys aren’t going anywhere. This isn’t sledding snow; you’re sinking into it. There’s no way you’re going to make it down that hill.”

But I was determined, and the kids were hearing none of it. We did eventually make it down the hill, inching our way along in an abs workout as I had never before experienced, in no less than half the time it took us to get to the damn park. After a trek back up the hill that was equally as tiring and long, I collapsed at Duncan’s feet.

“You know we still have to walk back, right?” he asked with a smartass grin.

I sighed, stood, and jumped on his back. “Give me a piggy back ride,” I ordered as he face planted into the snow.

He grumbled and stood before dumping me into the nearest pile. “Get walking, lazy.”

 

A few more runs had made the sleds a little easier to control, but by the end of the next hour, we were struggling to stay standing. The long walk back left us all dead tired and collapsed around the living room, sleeping for a full four hours before we finally had enough energy left to move. It was five o’clock before I found my way, joints cracking, to the kitchen, where an elaborate dinner of pork chops and potatoes was being served. I turned to my mother as she boiled enough green beans to feed half of California.

“Dinner is served,” she announced, passing me a dish to carry to the table, which had somehow been made to accommodate thirteen people. My friends stumbled in from their own naps, pleasantly surprised by the feast. Horatio was the last to join, situating the children before turning to mom.

“Do you still have my old cello?” he asked as he served himself a pound of potatoes.

My fork stopped halfway to my mouth, which hung open. I stared at him. “Since when do you play the cello?”

He gave me a curious look over his glasses. “Since eight grade?” 

“Even I knew that,” Antigone sneered.

“I’ve never heard a cello in this house before!”

“That’s because you spent every night that I lived here out at dance classes and voice lessons and piano practice. Sometimes I forgot I even had a sister.”

Mom gave us all a look that shut us up before turning to Horatio. “We have it somewhere in the attic with the rest of the instruments we don’t use anymore, I’m not sure where exactly.”

Duncan looked amused. “You just have instruments that no one plays?”

I shook my head. “If we have them, someone in this house knows how to play them; it’s just that we’ve lost interest in practicing.”

“I think the only one that has never been stored away is the piano,” Leo mused offhandedly as he stared at a spoonful of mashed potatoes. “My old flugelhorn is probably up there,” he said thoughtfully as he continued to eat.

“You actually just said ‘flugelhorn’, didn’t you?” Colby raised his eyebrows. “This may be the weirdest family I know.”

“Would it be okay if I went and found it after dinner?” Horatio asked.

“Sure, why not?” Mom shrugged. “Why?”

“I was going to play it. That’s usually what you do with cellos.”

“Well, you’ve got to be the one to get it. I don’t know what’s up there or if you can even fit in that tiny attic, but if you can it’s alright by me.”

Horatio’s eyes scanned the table, squinting at each of us. After a second, he threw two arms out and pointed at Lux and I. “You two are tiny!”

We both looked down at ourselves, and then up at him, Lux raising an eyebrow. “Your point being?”

“I’m sending the two of you searching for my cello!”

I rolled my eyes and Lux sighed. “Do we have to?”

“Oh come on. Who knows what kind of magical and forgotten old instruments of yours are lurking up there. Go find the forgotten memories of your childhood!”

“You really want that cello, don’t you?”

“There is absolutely no way I’m going to manage to fit my butt into that absolutely miniscule crawlspace of a storage room we call an attic. Please?” For the second time in as many days, my brother actually begged me. “I always play my cello before bed in my apartment; I miss it.”

“Cass, why don’t you guys do it?” my dad chimed in unexpectedly. “Bring down all our old things; we can have a music night and entertain the kids.”

I paused to think about all the games of ‘Candy Land’, ‘Hungry Hippos’, ‘Trouble’, and (God forbid) ‘Pretty Pretty Princesses’ that would await us all if I said no. “I’d be happy to!” I said cheerily, an old detestation for board games rearing its ugly head. “In fact, why don’t Lux and I go get those boxes right now and see what we can find?”

“What?” Lux asked, suddenly brought into the conversation.

“Yeah.” I jumped up. “Right now.”

“But my pork chop-”

Her fork clattered to the plate as I grabbed her by the arm. We returned twenty minutes later with several deliveries of boxes and cases filled to the brim with instruments and their required odds and ends.

“I can’t believe you have all this,” Lux said to the group gathering in the living room. “That attic is packed; I almost put my foot through the cello before I knew it was there.”

Horatio’s face drained of color as I began rummaging through the first box.

“Why do we have a ukulele?” I asked as I found the thin instrument. 

Dad laughed. “I wondered where that went! Is my unicycle there, too?”

It was not, but Mayu took this opportunity to lean over and whisper, “Your dad may just be the most awesome adult on this face of the planet.”

I denied it as I passed the ukulele to my dad. “Do you really know how to play this?”

“No, but if you hum a few bars I can catch on.” He strummed the strings once, proving in no more than a second that he could not, in fact, play it.

Leo held out a hand. “Give me a go!” He grabbed it and surprised us all as several decent chords came from the strings. A minute of tuning and it sounded pretty good; I chuckled as he stood and began swaying his hips as he strummed a hula. 

“Not bad,” Lux said with a smile as Mayu nodded enthusiastically. 

“Know any songs?” Colby asked.

He must have been waiting to hear the words, because Leo jumped on the couch and began swaying again, a big and goofy smile on his face. “ _He-ey, he-e-e-e-ey, he-e-e-e-ey_!” We laughed and clapped enthusiastically; I’d forgotten that Leo actually had a very good voice.  _“Your lipstick stains on the front lobe of my left side brains! I knew I wouldn’t forget you, and so I went and let you blow my mind!”_

I stood up and grabbed Horatio by the hands, dancing a funny kind of dance in a circle, almost tribal, as we laughed and my friends and the little kids cheered. “ _You’re sweet, moonbeam; the smell of you in every single dream I dream! I knew when we collided- you’re the one, I have decided- who’s one of my kind!_

_“Hey, soul sister, ain’t that Mr. Mister on the radio? Stereo? The way you move ain’t fair, you know! Hey, soul sister, I don’t want to miss a single thing you do… tonight!_

_“He-ey! He-e-e-e-ey! He-e-e-e-ey!”_

“Me now!” I turned around to see Lino jumping up and down. “My turn! I want to dance with Cassie!”

Well how could I resist that? I picked him up and spun him around in circles. His siblings began yelling almost simultaneously, prompting Mayu to grab Emilio in a massive spin hug and Horatio to prop Gisela up on his hip and sway back and forth to the beat. 

_“Just in ti-i-i-ime, I’m so glad you’ve got a one-track mind like me! You gave my life direction; a game-show love connection we can’t deny-y-y-y-y-y! I’m so obsessed! My heart is bound to beat right out my untrimmed chest! I believe in you, like a virgin, you’re Madonna, and I’m always going to want to blow your mind!_

_“Hey, soul sister, ain’t that Mr. Mister on the radio? Stereo? The way you move ain’t fair, you know! Hey, soul sister, I don’t want to miss a single thing you do… tonight!”_

I traded Lino with Mayu and took Emilio as Duncan took Gisela and- most surprisingly- my dad and mom began dancing with us. Colby took Lux’s hand and they, too, began dancing, as Leo laughed and kept dancing on his own.

_“The way you can cut a rug; watching you’s the only drug I need!-”_

“ _So gangster, I’m so thug!_ ” my friends and I cheered loudly, laughing at ourselves and Leo’s undeniably surprised expression.

“ _You’re the only one I’m dreaming of, you see! I can be myself now, finally, in fact there’s nothing I can’t be! I want the world to see you be with me!_

_“Hey, soul sister, ain’t that Mr. Mister on the radio? Stereo? The way you move ain’t fair, you know! Hey, soul sister, I don’t want to miss a single thing you do… tonight!_

_“Hey, soul sister, I don’t want to miss a single thing you do… tonight! He-ey! He-e-e-e-ey! He-e-e-e-ey! Tonight- He-ey! He-e-e-e-ey!”_  He smiled and dragged out the last chord. “ _Tonight!”_

We cheered enthusiastically, the kids most of all. Leo bowed deeply, turning it into a summersault and landing with a ‘thump’ and a loud ‘ow’ on the floor; the kids only laughed harder as Duncan and Colby helped him up.

“Nice, man,” Duncan said as he helped my brother up. “I didn’t know you could sing.” 

Colby laughed as the rest of us chuckled. “Are you kidding? In addition to the playing of an instrument, it’s practically a requirement to live in this house.” As if to prove it, he opened another box and produced a banjo. “Okay, this one I don’t have an answer for.”

Much to my surprise, my mother was the one who laughed. “I remember that thing! I went through a country phase a few years ago!” She laughed and took the instrument by its neck and examined the body.

Antigone rolled her eyes, raised an unnaturally thin eyebrow, and gave Mom a sarcastic look. “Wow, redneck much?”

“Love you too, babe,” Mom muttered with the sarcasm that flowed though our Hathaway blood. She picked a few notes out of it and managed not to sound like a hillbilly at all. “I was big on the country music, like Grandma raised me on. I mean, still very folk-y, but much more modern country.”

“I remember that!” I cheered. “You knew every song by that one band-”

“Nickel Creek!” Leo chimed in with a clap. “Come on, Mom, play us one!”

Mom shot a glance at Dad. “You’re the only one in this house who knows the harmonies. Are you in?”

Dad held up a finger before running out of the room.

“I’ll take that as a no.”

Dad ran back in only seconds later with a fifty-year-old acoustic guitar that was traditionally kept in his office, away from the disasters that would undoubtedly befall it if it were always around. He quickly tuned it before smiling charmingly at my mother. “Anything for you, my dear.”

She smiled and kissed him; my friends let out a group ‘aww’ as my siblings and I looked away in disgust.

“Your parents are so cute!” Lux said in a squeal.

“Yeah,” I mumbled as Antigone mimed vomiting. “We, uh. Yeah, we get that a lot.”

“Oh, shut it,” Mom ordered. She picked out a few delicate notes, hardly looking at the strings as she did. Dad waited a few seconds before coming in with his own light chords, perfectly matching the notes and tone without even trying.

_“If today was not an endless highway,_ ” Mom began singing, “ _if tonight was not a crooked trail. If tomorrow wasn’t such a long time, then lonesome would mean nothing to me at all. Yes, and only if my own true love was waiting; if I could hear his heart softly pounding. Yes, and only if he was lying by me would I lie in my bed once again.”_

I felt my mouth drop. I had always known my parents were musically talented, considering they’d been the ones to teach us our own abilities, but it had been so long since I’d heard them. And they were incredible. My friends could only stare, and even my siblings looked stunned. Our parents were amazing; they were never themselves so much as this moment we were seeing them in, playing like they’d often said they used to when they’d first met.

_“I can’t see my reflection in the water. I can’t speak the sounds that show no pain. I can’t hear the echo of my footsteps, or remember the sound of my own name.”_

I had never seen my parents clearer than in that moment, and I loved them all the more for it. Wonderful parents, two people in hopeless love with each other, and undeniably beautiful and admirable musicians.

_“There is beauty in that silver singing river. There is beauty in that sunrise in the sky. But none of these, and nothing else, can touch the beauty that I remember in my true love’s eyes. Yes, and only if my own true love was waiting; if I could hear his heart softly pounding. Yes, and only if he was lying by me would I lie in my bed once again.”_

They ended the chords and notes as lightly as they had begun and smiled at us. “What?” Dad asked when he saw our expressions.

Duncan, with his eyebrows high on his forehead, held out a hand. “That, sir, was one of the best things I’ve ever heard played.”

Dad laughed and shook his hand. “It’s just something we picked up on in college.”

“And carried on to teach every single one of your equally nerdy children,” Leo added. 

“Not that I’m complaining,” Horatio said as he pulled the massive cello case up from the pile. “I love our family nerdy-ness, even if the rest of the world does think we’re a little insane.”

“A little?” Colby laughed. “Dude, Leo used to play the flugelhorn.”

“I resent that!” Leo looked almost genuinely offended. “I bet I could still rock the flugelhorn if I could remember anything about it.”

Mom rolled her eyes as she put the banjo away. “That’s what a mother who paid for three years of flugelhorn lessons, drove her son to the North Side to the only teacher in town, and spent hours on end with earplugs in her ears was waiting to hear. Not ‘thanks’, just ‘if I remembered how to play it’.”

“You’re welcome, you’re welcome,” Leo chuckled.

The night went on for a while: Mom and Dad did their little country thing, Leo rediscovered his love of all instruments loud and unusual, Antigone even surprised us with her clarinet and flute (something I thought she had long since given up, since it wasn’t ‘cool’), and my friends and I joined in with harmonies and impromptu dance numbers when appropriate. The kids laughed and cheered and enjoyed themselves, but after a few hours were worn out and curled up on couches, lightly sleeping. Plopping down from our rendition of ‘I Feel Pretty’ (which had featured Duncan and Colby singing soprano’s far out of their range), Lux sighed.

“These three look as tired as I feel,” she all but groaned. 

“I know that feeling,” I muttered. Mayu curled up with her head on my lap and yawned.

“Maybe we should all go to bed,” Dad suggested, nodding towards my loudly snoring mother. “It’s pretty late.”

Horatio chuckled as he rosined his bow. “It’s only eleven; you guys would make terrible college students.” He tapped the extra sap off his bow and began pulling it slowly across the thickest string. The deep, heavy note radiated through the room, two octaves below middle C, making the air vibrate around it and through chests. It was an old Celtic tune, the “Ashoken Farewell”; its melodies lulled us into silence before we could as much as stand, drawing us in an inescapable web of sounds. With each song that ended, there was another that began; before long, we were all nothing short of asleep on the couches. I found myself lying with my head in Duncan’s lap, fighting with my eyelids as Horatio kept playing.

“You’re good,” Duncan said quietly.

My eyes were completely closed, but I could imagine Horatio smiled. “Thanks.”

 

_“In the midst of this nothing, this mess of life, still there’s this one thing just to see you go by,”_  I sang early the next afternoon, dancing around as I cooked a pan of chicken on the stove. The snow had stopped, the plows were slowly starting to make dents in the roads, and the small children had been returned to their mother an hour or so before. Tonight, the Hathaway house would be filled with only Hathaways again, since my friends were going to be leaving not long after lunch. I love them to death and all, but loving people and living with people are two completely different things.

As it was, we were having our own concert as we each did our share of the cooking- with the exception of Colby, who stood in the corner with his arms crossed and an amused expression on his face. “Someone is going to get burned or cut,” he said for the hundredth time.

Lux ignored him, shimmying as she mixed a salad.  _“It’s almost like loving, sad as that is.”_

_“May not be cool, but it’s so where I live!”_  Mayu joined in, cutting a large pot of potatoes into cubes.

I laughed.  _“It’s like I’m your lover, or more like your ghost. I spend the day wondering what you do, where you go.”_

Lux shrugged.  _“I try and just kick it, but then what can I do?”_

_“We’ve all got our junk-”_

“ _And my junk is you!_ ” The three of us all but screamed and laughed. “ _See us winter walking after the storm, it’s chill in the wind but it’s warm in your arms! I stop all snow blind,”_  we laughed at our uncontrolled and awful harmonies, but managed to recover.  _“May not be true, but we’ve all got our junk, and my junk is you!”_

Duncan jumped into the room dramatically, returning from setting the table. _“Well you have to excuse me, I know it’s so off; I love when you do stuff that’s rude and so wrong. I go up to my room, turn the stereo on, shoot up some you, and the you is some song!”_  We laughed as he did his own dance, shaking his butt as he grabbed some glasses.

“Dude, I did not want to see that.” Colby covered his eyes and sighed.

“Aw, come on!” Mayu pouted. “You know this song!”

_“I lie back just drifting and play out these scenes,”_  I sang at him, trying to prompt him to join. “ _I ride all the rush, all the hopes, all the dreams!”_  I shuffled over to him and poked him in the ribs.

He shook his head. “No. I know what kind of disasters happen when you all goof off.”

_“I may be neglecting the things I should do,”_  Lux joined in, poking his other side.  _“But we’ve all got our junk-”_

_“And my junk is you!”_  we yelled in his face.

“Come on, bro!” Duncan joined in. “You know you want to!”

Colby went to investigate the pan of burning chicken. “You’re burning this!”

Mayu latched onto his leg. “It’s good for your soul!”

That must have been the prompting he was looking for, because with a sigh he joined in. “ _See we still keep talking after you’re gone; you’re still with me then, feels so good in my arms.”_

We cheered and, with just a little more begging, got him to dance and sing our harmonies.  _“They say you go blind, maybe it’s true, but we’ve all got our junk, and my junk is you!_

_“Oh, it’s like we stop time; what can I do? We’ve all got our junk, and my junk is you! My junk is you! You, you, you!”_

Colby did a small dive across the kitchen to stop the massive salad bowl from toppling onto the tile. “See, what’d I tell you?”

“Oh, loosen up,” Lux ordered as she took the bowl from him and to the table. “Enjoy yourself. Standing in a corner with a locked jaw waiting for something bad to happen is exactly what your blood pressure doesn’t need. You’ll have a heart attack by twenty five like that.”

He rolled his eyes as we paraded to the table. “I’ll have you know that with the fatty foods I’ve eaten and limited exercise I’ve gotten this weekend, you’re probably right.”

“It’s okay!” Mayu said as she jumped into a chair. “I drink so much caffeine I probably have more kidney stones than you can count on both hands!”

Lux shrugged. “I would scold you for that, but god knows the rest of us are just as bad.”

Duncan sat down importantly, slamming his palms down on the table. “My slaves!” he yelled. “What’s the game plan?”

We stared at him. “Who are you calling slave, minion?” Mayu asked.

He shook his head. “No, seriously, how are we going to do this? It’s cold, there’s like two and a half feet of snow out there, and we’ve got like two hours of daylight left. And personally, I want to get home.”

“My parents are home,” Colby added. “The streets downtown got plowed first, so I have a place to return to.”

I shrugged. “We’ll all walk to Lux’s car, then go to Lux’s house, Mayu’s, hit up Duncan’s on our way back here, and then I guess Colby and I can make it home from there.” I wiggled my toes. “But I call my wool socks again.”

Mayu began laughing. “We get to see Lux’s spider!” she giggled as she devoured her food. “It’s going to be this itty bitty thing that compares to the tip of a pencil and we’re all going to get to laugh!”

“I hope it’s dead,” Lux mumbled as she began sulking. “After all that cold and snow, it better have frozen to death.”

Duncan shrugged. “Or maybe it had so many babies that they began a hostile spider empire in the back seat.”

Lux glared at him as I chuckled. “Duncan, if you don’t shut up, we’ll be breaking Lux out of jail for attempted murder. Or maybe posting bail.”

“What’d you mean maybe?” she shot back indignantly.

“I mean that I’m not scaling fifteen stories to break you out, and I’m not paying any more than a hundred thousand in bail.”

“Thanks, and I thought you loved me.”

“Hey! If it doesn’t involve rappelling gear and costs less than my limited checking account, I’m in, but attempted murder is usually ridiculously high in bail.”

Colby sighed as he examined his burnt piece of chicken. “You know, there was a time when my life was normal. When lunch conversations didn’t involve homicide, jailbreaks, and spiders. I miss that time.”

“That’s your own damn fault,” Mayu and I said at the same time. I shook my head at them as they gave unsettling glares across the table through the entire silent meal. Like I said, we may love each other, but living together was far beyond any of our tolerance levels. It was only one in the afternoon, but we were already tired by the time we cleaned up the kitchen and struggled into our snow gear.

“Look on the bright side,” I said with a smile as Lux tried to fit her Uggs over three pairs of socks. “Maybe the roads will be clear enough that you can drive home!”

She shrugged and rolled her eyes as we began walking. “Honestly? At this point, I would just be happy if I still have a car. Knowing my luck it probably got run over by the snowplow, or the roof caved in, or maybe even Mayu snuck out of your house in the middle of the night when she was hyped up on Mountain Dew and decided to set it on fire.”

Mayu laughed maniacally behind us. “I did want a bonfire pretty bad.”

“I’m sure we would have smelled the burning rubber,” Colby said sympathetically as he patted her back. “Or someone would have seen it and called a tow truck or something. Just be glad you didn’t park in front of a parking meter.”

Lux seemed a little more relaxed at this as we climbed over a snow bank and into the road, where two small lanes seemed to have been dug out by hand. “Maybe I really can drive home. And if the plows are out, I’m sure they would have seen a burning car.”

“You know what?” Duncan said after a moment of thought. “I think we should be genuinely concerned that we are friends with someone who would commit arson on her best friend’s car just because she wants roasted marshmallows.”

“Yeah, but you’ve only known her since the beginning of this year,” I giggled as I slipped clumsily on a patch of ice. “We’ve known her since fifth grade; there are much more concerning things to worry about.”

“Like what?”

“Like her remarkable habit to skip musical practice every other day with a month before opening.” I shook my head. “She causes a very specific type of panic attack in Wilkes that no one else can.”

“We’ll teach you to recognize the signs,” Lux added, sliding halfway down the hill with unexpected grace.

“Greatly appreciated.”

“Speaking of the Fifty-Thousand Year Old Woman,” Colby cut in as he did his best to descend the hill without falling, “I think we should worry about the panic attack she’s going to have now that we’re going to lose rehearsals.”

We stopped walking to stare at him. “You do know today is Sunday, right?” Duncan asked. “We haven’t even had a two-hour delay yet.”

“Do you honestly think we’re going to get to school in these roads tomorrow?” He pointed as we approached the main road, which still had a foot and a half of snow where the yellow lines should have been; the snow banks were at least twice that where the plows had been. “I doubt we’re going back for at least three days.”

I shrugged and began the difficult trek up a small icy hill. “Then we’ll just have to push the choreography back three days. I mean, it’s ‘Prima Donna’, which I wouldn’t mind putting off forever.”

Duncan chuckled. “You really hate that song, don’t you?”

“I’ve told you a million times, it plays in my head and keeps me up at night for hours on end; of course I hate it.”

He laughed as Lux began pointing up the road. “There!” she yelled. “There’s the car! Go kill it!”

Colby laughed as he struggled the rest of the way up the next small hill. The locks clicked as Lux pressed her remote, and, after a little bit of wrestling with the door, Colby stuck his head in the driver’s side door.

“JESUS FECKING CHRIST!” He jumped backwards, slamming the door as he did.

“I TOLD YOU!” Lux yelled at him, already hysterical again. “I TOLD YOU, I TOLD YOU, I TOLD YOU!”

Duncan, Mayu and I exchanged confused looks. “What-?”

“THERE’S A GODDAMN SPIDER IN THERE!” Colby bellowed his answer.

“No shit; wasn’t that what got us into this mess?” Duncan rolled his eyes and took a look himself. He hung onto the door as he stared. “Holy hell.”

“For the love of god, what?” I pushed past him to look for myself. There, on its back, with its legs folded over itself, was a great big fuzzy dead tarantula. “Holy flying shit. Lux, I thought you said there was a spider in your car?”

“There IS!” She did a funny dance as if the arachnid was on her skin. “THAT THING!”

“I thought you meant like a dime sized spider as usual!”

“Let me see!” Mayu pushed me out of way, looked in the car, and groaned. “Oh, no!”

“WHAT? ‘OH NO’ WHAT? IS IT STILL ALIVE?”

“No, it’s Marcus!”

We all stopped to look at her. “Marcus?” Colby repeated.

“Yeah! Lux, remember how you drove me home on Thursday to pick up my brothers from Sterrett the cause my parents didn’t want them walking those…” she stopped to consider the wording she was using, “‘projects’ all the way home by themselves?”

“Projects?” Lux’s eyes nearly jumped out of their sockets. “PROJECTS? YOU TOLD ME THEY HAD MINATURE IGUANAS!”

“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t have let them in the car if you’d known. Besides, they had their lids and we made sure that they had fleece blankets over them so you couldn’t tell!”

“YOU TOLD ME THAT WAS SO THE FREAKING LIZARDS DIDN’T FREEZE TO DEATH!”

“Nah, it was so you couldn’t see the tarantulas and abandon us. Anyway, we got home, and did a head count, and there was Ceon, Deon, and Leon, but Marcus was missing.” She shrugged. “Little bugger must have escaped. Serves them right for not making sure the lid was on tight enough.”

Duncan raised an eyebrow. “Ceon, Deon, Leon, and Marcus? Your brothers picked those as names for tarantulas?”

“They’re stranger than me; I don’t question them anymore.”

Lux’s face was crimson red as she digested this information. “YOU BROUGHT TARANTULAS INTO MY CAR!” she yelled at the top of her lungs, stomping a foot angrily on the ice.

“And you survived,” Mayu said with a calm smile and finality, her arms out as if she expected a hug. Lux pelted her with several snowballs to the face. “Okay! What if I drive to my house and we can dispose of the corpse and then you can drive home?”

Lux grumbled, but agreed. After a little digging on our part and displeased squeaking on Lux’s part, the dead tarantula was carefully set aside and the girls climbed in the car and cautiously set off, saving us a good two miles of walking with them. I sighed and began walking up Forbes again, linking arms with the boys’. “Maybe it’s something in the water, but I’ve become remarkably desensitized to the things that happen around me.”

“That,” Colby considered, “or you’re equally as insane as the two in that car.”

“I vote that you’re insane,” Duncan said with a nod.

I shrugged. “I’m sure in time I will come to terms with that.” They laughed as we approached a Starbucks that was, most surprisingly, open. “Anyone need a latte?”

They chuckled. “After the last three days with you?” Colby asked.

Duncan grabbed the door. “I need a latte more than I need blood right now.”

 

Colby ended up being right; we did not have school the next day. Or the day after that. In fact, the 2009-2010 school year became known as ‘The Year of Two Winter Breaks’ after the snow shut down the schools for an entire week. By the time I trudged out of the house and drove to school with Antigone at nine the next Monday, we’d been stuck in the house for a week straight and were damned annoyed with each other. For once, school was welcomed, despite the fact we were now going to be working twice as much to make up for lost time come rehearsal.

Teachers despise two-hour delay days, since we only have forty minutes in their class to begin with; classes end up being little more than twenty minutes, and no one had a real lesson plan to follow. I’d petitioned my teachers as soon as I’d gotten into the building to spend the day ‘working on the sets’ with some crew. And apparently, I wasn’t the only one with the idea.

“CASSIE!” Jo yelled as she jumped on me, clinging to my back like a monkey. “I missed you!”

“Great, you’re choking me!” I coughed until she jumped off. I looked around and sighed; most of the cast’s juniors and seniors were hanging out here today, and a good part of the crew was working on building the set pieces they’d been procrastinating. 

“Mayu!” Jo yelled to the balcony. “Cassie is here!”

“Yay Cassie!” the yell came from the balcony. I heard her pounding footsteps until she almost plummeted over the railing. She stopped and stared. “You look awful. Didn’t you sleep? You had two whole extra hours!”

I shrugged and rubbed my eyes. “I live with Antigone, it’s a Monday, I’ve set foot in Allderdice- do I need any more reasons to be tired?”

She nodded. “Point taken. You know we still have that bed from Beauty and the Beast hidden back in the dressing room, right?” 

“I did not know that.” Then I had to pause. “Why is it hidden?”

Mayu rolled her eyes. “This is Allderdice. Everyone knows that backstage is the best place to go to skip classes. If that bed weren’t hidden, people would be sneaking back in the middle of the day to do unspeakable things on that particular set piece. And as the number-one user of that bed, I would like to think that it is pure and untainted by the filth that is most of this school.”

It took me a second and a few blinks to comprehend what she had said, but as soon as I got it, a horrible shiver went down my spine. “Oh, dear god.”

“Don’t worry! It’s really well hidden under the boxes of old props; they end up using that cheap fake couch back there!”

I started to go take my nap, but had to stop and stare. “How do you know they’ve defiled our couch?”

She wrinkled her nose and pouted. “I’m here a lot. I’ve seen… things.”

With that horrific image in mind, I tromped up the stairs, across the stage, through the framework that was being built by the crew, and into the dressing room; Mayu wasn’t kidding about it being hidden. I found the small wooden frame and fully made mattress under a large table and hidden behind an ungodly amount of boxes. By the time I plopped down on it, I no more than closed my eyes before I fell asleep.

Something odd woke me up. I blinked a few times, realizing I’d curled up under the comforter. I checked my phone; I’d been asleep for way longer than I had intended to be. But I couldn’t figure out what the odd thing was that woke me.

And then I pushed off the cover, rolled over, and screamed.

Duncan, who had been fast asleep, woke up as soon as my fist collided with his stomach. I practically heard the wind get knocked out of him as I brought the nearest object swinging over my head- apparently I had grabbed a large rubber rat with a fuzzy mustache, because that’s what hit him.

“What are you doing?” he yelled, trying to block me with his arms.

“I could ask you the same thing!”

“I’m sleeping!”

“I was here first!”

“Since when? Dear god stop hitting me!”

“What happened?” I heard several sets of footsteps running into the room as Colby called. I crawled out from under the table as he, Lux, Mayu, and Greg raced in. “Is everything okay?”

“Duncan was sleeping with me!”

The worry turned right to amusement as they held back their laughter. “Did we walk in on a little hanky-panky?” Greg chuckled.

Duncan crawled out from under the table, looking disheveled and horrified. “There was no hanky-panky!” he yelled as I threw the rat at him. “Would you stop doing that? It hurts!”

“How long where you there?”

“I don’t know; half an hour!”

“Why did you sleep there if you saw me?”

“I didn’t see you! You were under blankets; I assumed you were a rolled up carpet or something!”

Our friends were laughing in the corner. “I’m sorry, Duncan, I had no idea she was already back there!” Lux said through her giggles. “I didn’t think you were going to be attacked with a rubber rat with a mustache!”

I glared at her and snarled. “You are the one! You sent him back here?”

“He was tired! I thought it was a good idea!”

Mayu laugh her maniacal cackle. “I told Cassie where we hid the bed an hour and a half ago!” She sighed with a wide smile. “This couldn’t have been funnier if I’d planned it.”

We looked up as Dakota poked her head in from the hall. “Did I hear someone scream?”

“Cassie found Duncan in her bed,” Greg said simply with a shrug. “She was beating him over the head with a rubber rat with a mustache and we thought it was necessary to stand here and laugh at them while they fought it out. Is everything cool out there? 

“Icy.” She waved for us to follow her. “Billy and Ian have a surprise for Cassie.”

“Oh yeah!” Mayu jumped behind me and threw her hands over my eyes. “You’re not going to believe this!”

I stumbled over the crap scattered in the hallway and laughed as three pairs of hands steadied me. “I’ve been asleep for half the day; how much could they possibly have done since the last time I traipsed across the stage?”

“Shut up, Ms. Big Vocabulary. When was the last time you were in the scene shop?”

I shuddered. “Never. That place is a death trap; there’s a damn chainsaw hanging from the ceiling, why would I even want to go in there?”

“To see what they’re building!” Dakota said as she threw the wing door open with a little too much force, sending it crashing into something. I flinched noticeably. “It’s okay; it just took a little chunk out of the wall as usual.”

“Maybe instead of building new things, those guys should fix the already broken ones,” I grumbled as they led me to the stage. When they had me positioned just right, Mayu threw her hands up, all of them yelling, “Surprise!”

My jaw dropped. There, on the stage, was a full grand staircase, complete with wheels and wheel locks on the frame, painted gold banisters, and fully carpeted steps. There were stained-glass windows made of plastic at each side on the top, and though I knew there was a seam in it where it would separate into two parts, it was completely hidden and I couldn’t find any sign of it. It was a work of art.

“Where did you steal this from?” I asked, turning to Ian. “And how much is it going to cost to repay them?”

“Oh ye of little faith!” he laughed, hooking my arm with his and ascending the stairs. “This is completely hand-made, built from scratch piece by piece in the scene shop! The last week, Billy and I snuck in while school was canceled and constructed this before Wilkes could have a panic attack about how much wasn’t done.”

I looked him up and down. “How could you possibly have snuck into this school?”

“You know that window in the dressing room bathroom that’s like a foot tall and a foot and a half wide?” I nodded. “It’s never locked, and Billy is a skinny little bastard; he climbed in there and opened the door for me. And we both have keys to get into the shop, so we just built, painted and carpeted the main pieces, came back today, and put them all together with the help of our little minions!”

Down the back, there were two sets of stairs that would allow the dancers to make their grand entrances. I looked down at the auditorium from the top of the staircase. “Um, are you sure this is safe? Especially those rickety stairs in the back?”

“Well, we still have to install a railing back here, but we’re sure. We’re going to have people holding the frame from the inside, just in case the wheel locks aren’t enough.” He smiled. “This is one of the greatest things we’ve ever built!”

“I’ll have to agree with you on that.”

He smirked. “Want to test it?”

I smiled widely before turning out to the cast. “Okay! ‘Masquerade’ places!”

_“And get over here to hold the stairs!”_  Ian ordered into the wings. In a minute, everyone was in places as Mayu began the music and yelled,  _“Action!”_

Eric and Jake walked on, chuckling and chatting good-naturedly.  _“Dear Andre, what a splendid party!”_ Jake sang with a laugh in his voice.

_“The prologue to a bright new year,”_  Eric agreed.

_“Quite a night; I’m impressed!”_

_“Well one does one’s best!”_

_“Here’s to us!”_  They shook hands and laughed.

_“The toast of all the city!”_

Jake laughed.  _“What a pity that the Phantom can’t be here!”_  They walked off, still jabbering as the cast on the stairs froze in their positions. They began small movements as they sang, looking like they held private conversations despite the lyrics they were projecting through the auditorium.

_“Masquerade!”_  they sang. “ _Paper faces on parade; masquerade! Hide your face so the world will never find you! Masquerade!”_  They began making their way down the steps.  _“Every face a different shade; masquerade! Look around- there’s another mask behind you!”_

More people began descending from the top of the stairs as if they were only just arriving; it looked seriously legendary. Once they had their costumes on, they would be even cooler, each singing off details of their costumes. “ _Flash of mauve!”_

_“Splash of puce!”_

_“Fool and king!”_

_“Ghoul and goose!”_

_“Green and black!”_

_“Queen and priest!”_

_“Trace of rouge!”_

_“Face of beast!”_

_“Faces!”_  they sang together.  _“Take your turn, take a ride on the merry-go-round; in an inhuman race!_

_“Eye of gold!”_

_“Thigh of blue!”_

_“True is false; who is who?”_

_“Curl of lip!”_

_“Swirl of gown!”_

_“Ace of hearts!”_

_“Face of clown!”_

_“Faces! Drink it in; drink it up, ‘til you’ve drowned in the light, in the sound!”_

_“But who can name the face?”_  the ballerinas asked.

_“Masquerade! Grinning yellows, spinning reds! Masquerade; take your fill, let the spectacle astound you! Masquerade; burning glances, turning heads! Masquerade; stop and stare at the sea of smiles around you! Masquerade; seething shadows, breathing lies! Masquerade; you can fool any friend who ever knew you! Masquerade; leering satyrs, peering eyes! Masquerade; run and hide, but a face will still pursue you!”_

_“What a night!”_  Stephie sang as she began her decent with Megan at her side.

_“What a crowd!”_  Megan agreed.

_“Makes you glad-”_  Eric began as he, too, climbed down the stairs.

Jake cut him off.  _“Makes you proud! All the crème de la crème!”_

_“Watching us,”_  Allison nodded, with Chris as Piangi at her side,  _“watching them!”_

_“And all our fears are in the past!”_  Megan all but sighed.

Eric laughed and pretended to raise a glass.  _“Six months!”_

“ _Of relief!”_  Chris held his own fake glass.

“ _Of delight!”_  Alison giggled.

_“Of Elysian peace!”_  Jake added dramatically.

“ _And we can breathe at last,”_  Stephie added aside.

Alison threw her head back and laughed.  _“No more notes!”_

_“No more ghost!”_  Chris laughed with her.

_“Here’s a health,”_  Stephie proposed.

A cast member walked by; Eric mimed taking more glasses from his passing tray.  _“Here’s a toast: to a prosperous year!”_

_“To the new chandelier!”_  Jake gratefully accepted his imaginary glass.

They began singing back and forth so fast it was hard to tell who it was saying what.  _“And may its splendor never fade!” “What a joy!” “What a change!” “What a blessed release!”_

“And what a masquerade.” Stephie turned to the audience and raised her glass, giving them a raised eyebrow and knowing nod before sweeping to the side of the stairs with the rest of the conversations.

Colby and I emerged from the surprisingly strong steps and onto the main stairs. I held hopelessly to his arm as we very slowly climbed down. “ _Think of it! A secret engagement! Look: your future bride!”_  I let out a giggle and turned to face him. “ _Just think of it!_ ”

“ _But why is it secret?_ ” he asked patiently, leaning down for a kiss.  _“What have we to hide?_ ” I turned my head as he leaned closer.  _“Christine, you promised me.”_

_“No, Raoul, please don’t! They’ll see!”_

_“Well then let them see! It’s an engagement, not a crime. Christine, what are you afraid of?”_

“ _Let’s not argue_ ,” I begged.

_“Let’s not argue.”_

_“Please pretend-”_

_“I can only hope-”_

_“You will understand in time!”_

A waltz began, intricate and dizzying. Partners danced together, danced up the stairs, made way for new dancers, and covered the entire stage. Colby and I waltzed through the middle of it, laughing with each other and quietly correcting the other’s choreography as we did. At the crescendo, half the cast ran up the stairs, leaving the rest of us with our backs to the seats as we watched them.

_“Masquerade!_ ” they sang again, louder than before; this time they were moving in carefully planned time, completely simultaneously. “ _Paper faces on parade! Masquerade; hide your face so the world will never find you!”_  I laughed, delighted with how perfectly they managed it. “ _Masquerade; every face a different shade! Masquerade; look around- there’s another mask behind you!_

_“Masquerade; burning glances, turning heads! Masquerade; stop and stare at the sea of smiles around you! Masquerade; grinning yellows, spinning reds! Masquerade; take your fill, let the spectacle astound you!”_

We held our places while the techies in the audience cheered for us. I laughed and waved to Mayu and Duncan in the balcony. “What’d you guys think?”

“I think Ian and Billy really know what they’re doing!” Duncan yelled back. “I guess the snow week wasn’t a total waste!”

“Speaking of which!” We all turned to see Wilkes as she walked into the auditorium.

“Hey Wilkes!” I yelled with a wave. “The boys built the staircase!”

“I can see that,” she said with a slightly amazed look. “I didn’t think you guys had even started that?”

Ian laughed and jumped off the stage. “Wilkes, when was the last time you were in the scene shop?”

“When I had to help your predecessors fix an alarmingly large nail gun that was back there six years ago, which left me swearing that I would never be back there again. Why?”

“Cause it was all back there the entire time,” Billy said with a wink to me. “You slay us, Wilkes. Ye of little faith, you and Cassie.”

She shook her head and laughed. “Well I’m glad you guys finished it, but that’s not why I’m here.” She let out a shrieking whistle and waved to everyone; they jumped to attention in a split second. “It’s a two-hour delay day. The activity buses aren’t going to run and all after school clubs and activities are canceled. I was going to come down here and rant about how we’ll never be ready in time if we don’t have more rehearsals, but I’m not nearly as bothered by it now.” She chuckled. “You guys should go when school is over. If you need me, I’ll still be in my room.” And with that, she left with a wave over her shoulder.

We stared after her. Lux finally spoke.

“Well, if we have the rest of the day, why don’t we spend it doing something worthwhile?” she suggested with a shrug. “I can start running light cues, Mayu can start running a few checks on hanging and standing mics for the orchestra, the crew can start running their scene changes- maybe we can even clean out the dressing rooms a little!” She smiled widely. “Come on! What’d you say?”

I thought about it. “I’ll be in the dressing room if anyone needs me.”

“You want some people to help?”

I laughed. “Considering I’m going back to sleep? I think I’ll be okay!” I winked up at Duncan. “Unless that guy up there wants me to make his ass black and blue again.”

“Is that a threat or a promise?”

I contemplated chasing him around the room and proving that it indeed was a threat, but I chuckled and sighed. “You know where to find me!” I yelled over my shoulder. I walked back, curled up on the mattress, and was blissfully dead to the whole of Allderdice for another day.


	6. Act V: Time Has Flown

I woke up one morning with a shocking realization. My report card had arrived in the mail the day before, and I was passing all my classes (albeit not with flying colors, but passing nonetheless.) I came to the realization that I was a fourth quarter senior; I was hardly expected to show up for class, do more than bullshit essays, and live for anything other than the musical.

Okay, it was essentially the way I lived the rest of the year, but now I only had nine weeks of it.

I also had the awful realization that Leo had moved back in his bedroom.

“Morning, sis!” He yelled early one Saturday. He tossed one of my heavy and extensively detailed costumes on my bed. The intricate beading on the wrist hit me square in the forehead. “Come on, you’ve got a metric-shit-ton of stuff to start carrying.”

I half sat up and stared at him with bleary eyes. “Leo, get out of my room.”

“No can do!” Another box of fabric landed next to my bed with a muffled ‘thump’. “Dad isn’t going to let my crap sit downstairs forever! I’ve got to get it all back in my room!”

As Duncan’s ‘Masquerade’ costume went flying through the door and landed on Anubis and Ra, our dog and cat, I jumped up, suddenly awake. “Come on, dude, you can’t do that!” I pulled the costume up, but it already had a mix of black and calico furs on it, as well as a healthy sized claw mark near the hem. I stared at Leo. “I’m going to make you pay for this.”

“I need my closet!”

“I need a storage room!”

“Semester is over and my lease on the apartment is up! In all those dressing rooms at ‘Dice, there isn’t room for like 8 more dresses?”

“You know full well that only one of those rooms has a lock on it! And we already have that room filled to the breaking point!” I put on a pouty face. “Please, please, please, please? Please, most wonderful big brother? Just until the middle of May. Maybe a little longer, depending on the Kelly nominations.”

He looked at me and sighed. “Then can you please store some of it in your room?”

In response, I pulled open all of my drawers and threw open the doors to my larger than average closet. Each one was filled to the brim with neatly folded costumes or large and extensive gowns. I pulled a single laundry basket out from under my bed.

“These are my shirts and pajamas,” I said calmly and evenly. “My socks, jeans, and under-things are being stored in a basket under Antigone’s bed.”

He stared, horrified. “I guess I can spare some space.”

“Ding dong,” Colby yelled as he and Duncan paraded through our front door. I snapped my robe shut as they walked in the living room.

“Cassie, what are you doing?” Duncan asked as soon as he saw me.

“Watching Saturday morning cartoons.”

“Upside-down?”

I sat up and stuck my tongue out at him. “You got a problem with that?”

He put his hands up as if he was surrendering. “Nope, just asking.”

Colby sat down next to me. “We have a huge favor to ask you.”

I crossed my legs, turned off the TV, and pulled Ra onto my lap, stroking him maniacally. “A favor, you say?” I laughed evilly. “I am listening.”

“Cass, that’s creepy.”

“I know. What is your request?”

They looked like they were considering saying something, but changed their minds. “We have our final LTP due in like two weeks.”

I laughed. “Sucks to be you!” LTPs were the requirements for Advanced Studies students to graduate: one every year for four years, on a different topic and in a differed class. “I finished mine weeks ago.”

“Total bullshit?”

“Complete and utter bullshit. I don’t know anything about biology.” 

“Then why are you taking CAS/AP Anatomy and Physiology?”

“It looks good on my record,” I said with a shrug. “I don’t know how I’m passing, though, considering I spent yesterday making one of the skulls talk like Achmed the Dead Terrorist.”

“Seriously?”

“I named him Yorick.”

“Right.” Duncan shrugged. “Anyway, Colby and I teamed up in French 3 to do ours. And we need your help.”

“Sorry, dudes, I take Spanish.”

“But you sing! Well!” Colby said, as if that made any sense.

I paused to think for a minute. “Okay, but I’m not seeing the connection.”

They sighed collectively. “We’re doing a music video with French music.” Duncan said.

“And we need you to do it for us,” Colby concluded.

I laughed and shooed Ra away. “Sorry, boys, I can’t speak a word of French. Leo was the language master of the family.”

“I still am,” he said as he walked into the room, his mouth full of lasagna. “Hey, how old is this stuff I’m eating?”

I examined the plate. “The lasagna is two weeks, the peas are a week and a half, and I can’t remember the last time we had cabbage.”

He looked down, looked at his fork, and continued eating. “Still better than what they’re feeding me at school.” He sat next to me. “What’s this about languages?”

“They want me to sing in French for their LTPs,” I said. “That smells vile.”

“Tastes not completely rotten. What song?”

“‘Je ne t’Aime Plus’,” Colby said with a flawless accent, “or ‘Et Je Danse’. We like ‘Et Je Danse’ best, especially with Cassie.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, clueless.

“‘I Don’t Love You Anymore’ and ‘And I Dance’,” Leo clarified. “I know ‘Je ne t’Aime Plus’. That’s a pretty depressing song.”

“Well, that one’s kind of a back up. If Cass doesn’t agree, we’re going to offer you food to do it.”

“Yeah, but ‘Et Je Danse’ is perfect for what we want to do.” Duncan stood up and faced the wall, making grand hand gestures. “We’ll use the stage. And it’s very bare except for Cassie at the piano. And as she sings, another Cassie comes out dressed like a ballerina and dances pointe to what other Cassie is singing!” He looked at me with a ‘thumbs up’ gesture. “We got the idea from you and that original ‘White Houses’ video with the two Vanessa Carlton’s dancing together.”

I gave him a hand gesture of my own.

“Hey, be nice!”

“It’s too early to be nice.”

They all agreed that this was an appropriate answer.

“Well, you know, I know French,” Leo said, as though we didn’t know that. “I could teach you what you have to know.”

“I like knowing what I’m singing,” I muttered.

“That would take too long. I can teach you the poetic idea, but that’s about it.” 

I sighed. “What is the point? What would I gain from this? I’m swamped as it is!”

They all laughed. “Cass, the costumes are finished,” Colby said.

“The programs are at the printer’s,” Duncan continued.

“And I bet you any money that the cast has been fully prepared for at least a month, and you’re just fretting over little details that no one in the audience is going to be able to notice anyways,” Leo jeered through a mouthful of rotting something-or-other.

“I know that all,” I said. “But what is in it for me?” I stuck my tongue out at them. “Nah, I’m just kidding; of course I’ll do it.”

Colby and Duncan high-fived. “Sweet.” Duncan handed me a CD. “The song is by Cecilia Cara, I think you’ll like her even if she can’t act, it’s in-”

“Didn’t she play Juliette in Romeo et Juliette: de la Haine a l’Amour?”  I asked, cutting him off. “I know what you mean; she was a pretty terrible actress; all that looking towards the ceiling and raising her arm above her head was just so melodramatic.” I stopped. “Why are you all staring at me?”

“So you don’t know French, but you know an entire musical in that language?” Leo asked.

“Of course! I’m the theatre geek, why wouldn’t I?”

“So do you know the English one as well?”

“Of course, but it’s completely ridiculous and the lyrics are terribly campy.”

Colby sighed. “I bet you any money it’s on her list of musicals to be in.”

“The French version certainly is, as well as the Hungarian. I mean, Romeo et Juliette and Les Dix Commandements are the two most successful and internationally known French musicals. I’d be a bad theatre geek if I didn’t know them!”

They shook their heads.

 

I stared at the sheet music Duncan had given me. “Dude, this is way too easy.”

Colby rolled his eyes. “It’s still different from your Spanish.”

I stood importantly. “Me laisse emporté par les remous de mes pensées. Mystérieux abbaye, où les vagues se meurent à mes pieds, et font naître mes rêves,” I read proudly.

They laughed. “It sounds like you’re choking,” Colby said through his laughter.

“That’s what French sounds like!” I stomped my foot and put my hand on my hips. “You should just be glad I’m doing this at all.”

They looked at each other and nodded. “Right, sorry. It’ll sound amazing once you’re singing it. Now go back to getting your shoes on.” 

We were in the auditorium, skipping most of our classes for the day. They had several of Horatio’s and Leo’s professional cameras set up in the audience and more extra videos than I could count. I sat down again and slipped my toe pads on before slipping on my deep pink satin pointe shoes. I noticed Duncan staring as I wrapped and tied the ribbons around my ankles.

“Can I help you?”

“No, I’m just wondering how you do that without losing feeling in your toes.”

“I don’t.” I spun a few circles with my foot before standing. 

“Are you sure you can still do this?” Colby asked as I paraded up on stage. “You’ve been missing your dance classes for like a month and a half.”

Instead of responding, I did a plié and went up on relevé with my toes, then followed with a perfect series of piqués and pirouettes from one end of the stage to another. I looked up at him. “Does that answer your question?”

He chuckled. “Sorry I asked.” He turned to Duncan. “Are we all set?”

They nodded to each other, and then back to me. After taking a minute to adjust my knee-length tutu, I rolled my eyes and resumed relevé. “Whenever you want to play the music, I will be fine with that.”

They did, and I stood there for a second, waiting for the moment to be perfect. When it was, I went into simple freestyle ballet beautifully and gracefully, arching each movement as long and carefully. Each muscle tensed perfectly and stretched artistically, holding its form long and hard. There were several wonderful ‘cracks’ as my body readjusted to movements it hadn’t be called on to perform for a while- probably longer than it should have been. But it felt good to be back in the motion.

My hair was up in an incredibly tight bun, set like a crown at the top of my head with a few simple rings of pearl beads around it. One small light brown strand fell down my cheek, brushing at my lip with every quick turn I made. I had pale tights under my white leotard, which had simple thin straps and a low back. Over it, I wore a white tutu that ran from my waist to my knees in several layers of pearlescent tulle. My ears held simple white pearls.

I finished with a final long and slow arabesque, looking like a figure in a music box. Even I marveled at how a single block of ceramic in my shoe managed to support my entire weight, my body not even shaking with effort.

As I set my feet down flat, I looked out at the boys. “How was that?”

They stared, speechless, their mouths dropped open.

“Boys?”

Colby was the first to regain cognitive ability. “Wow.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

“Wow. I mean-”

“We knew you danced,” Duncan finally said, with more ability to form words than his best friend, “but I guess we didn’t know what exactly that meant.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’ll take that to mean you liked it?”

“Liked? Try loved?” Colby waved the digital camera he held. “And you should see some of these bad-ass pictures I took. Your Facebook is going to get like 200 hits in the next two days if you change your profile picture.”

I exchanged a look with Duncan. “I think that was a complement?”

“I’m pretty sure,” Duncan said, mystified. “I think he called you hot.”

“In that case, thank you.” I tossed my tutu aside. “Do you guys want to try it again with a different tutu?”

“You have multiple tutus?”

I laughed. “I have multiple tutus in multiple colors.” I shrugged. “I can get some PBT summer jobs when the CLO has no openings.”

Duncan stared. “And how is it you’re not part of a union yet?”

“I don’t know,” I said with a shrug as I pulled a stiff, wide, professional tutu out of a bag and pulled it on. I adjusted it a little until it stuck straight out from my waist. “Shall we?”

Later, I emerged from the dressing room, completely changed.

Duncan turned to Colby. “Is it just me, or does she get sexier and sexier every time we see her?”

Colby held his hands up in a gesture that clearly said ‘leave me out of this’ while I gave Duncan a colorful hand gesture of my own.

“Back off, Duncan, I know ever swear word in American Sign Language.”

“And several that are just generally American,” he chuckled at my hand. “Deny it all you want, you’re hot.”

I waved him off as I walked on the stage, black heels clicking on the wooden stage. They had set up a green screen behind and around the piano, intending to Photoshop it in front of my dancing. As a contrast to the white ballerina, I was now wearing a long sleeved black sweater that fell off my shoulders and an airy, multilayered black skirt. My hair fell down my back with the exception of one small piece bobby pinned out of my face- the same piece that had before fallen to my lips.

“Can we move on to the subject at hand?” I asked. “What do you want me to do?”

Colby rolled his eyes. “To walk on, play the piano, get up and walk off. We’re not asking you to go, like, back flip off the stage and do cartwheels though the hallways.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Do you want me to? I mean, I can if you want me to.”

He rolled his eyes again; I was a move he used so much that I was starting to believe it was a facial tick. “Give us what we want to see and it’ll be okay.”

I saluted as I walked off. I heard them go to each camera before they situated themselves in the uncomfortable seats before I heard Duncan yell, “Action, sexy!”

I knew the only reason he was saying it was because the cameras were rolling their precious film and I couldn’t come hit him. With a sigh, I walked out to the piano and sat in front of it. After a moment, I took my right hand and tinkered out the simple intro I had memorized by now.

With a breath, I began the words whose sounds I had memorized; their meaning was retained in loosely translated sentences that Leo had taught me over the past week.

_“Piano blanc sur la plage, refrain d’une enfant sage.”_  It meant, ‘White piano on the beach, the refrain of a wise child.’

_“Toi velours fait de sables le vent sur mon visage.”_

‘The pile of sand, the wind on my face.’

_“Et je me souviens de ces mots qui t’allaient si bien. Me rêves incertains; où j’espérais l’amour au rivage, de mes lendemains?”_

I rolled my shoulders back and sat a little more confidently. The next part was, by far, the most beautiful and meaningful of the entire song. 

_“Si on danse, en silence; porter par le souffle du temps. De saisons en passion; cet enfant en moi rêvait tant: l’unique instant… d’aimer vraiment…”_

As I sat there, I tried to imagine what it would look like, both me dancing to my own music. This really was a beautiful language, even if I was mangling it to make it sound like I was choking.  _“Tu peux peindre les eaux du bleu de ton regard, et dans chaque canot prés de toi je m’égare; me laisse emporté par les remous de me pensés. Mystérieux abbaye, où les vagues se meurent à mes pieds, et font naître mes rêves._

_“Et je danse, en silence, porté par le souffle du temps. De saisons, en passion; je veux croire en mes illusions, en mes rêves de l’enfant…”_

Something about the song was starting to glow, as crazy as that may sound. It meant something that I could actually feel; it was speaking to that part of everyone that held on to their illusions and childhood dreams; or rather ‘les illusions’ and ‘les rêves de l’enfant’.

_“Et je dance, en silence, porter par ton souffle à présent. Pour un jour, pour toujours; d’être part font brûler mon sang. Est-ce toi, cet homme là, a qui j’ai crié si souvent? ‘Rêve moi, une foi’. Il est là peut-être l’amour que j’attendais tant…”_

‘And I dance, in silence, carried by your breath. For a day, for forever, you make my blood burn. Is it really you, the man I’ve cried for so often? ‘Dream of me once’. Here is perhaps love as I expected.’

I hummed out the last few bars as I played the matching piano. I let the last notes ring; let them hang in the air. As soon as they were gone, I stood up and walked off, letting my heels click loudly. After a good minute of silence, I walked back out. “How was that, boys?”

Again, they were sitting in stunned silence, but this one was different. This wasn’t amazement or awe; something about this song, whoever heard it, could feel something ghostly about it. It was paranormal, but in the definition of ‘beside normal’ or ‘more than normal’, rather than against it.

Finally, Duncan nodded. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “That was good.”

 

Three days later, I was not surprised to find Lux, Mayu, Colby, and Duncan waiting in my living room as I paraded though the house, fresh out of the shower.

“What, pray tell, are you four doing here?” I asked, considerably less alarmed than I should have been. “It’s like 10 in the morning.”

“I was escaping Nyx,” Lux said, not looking up from the Saturday marathon of CSI that was playing on Spike.

“The brothers started going crazy on Rock Band at 6. They’re going for a record, trying for 24 hours,” Mayu said with the same indifference. “They’ve got two other nerds there, too.”

“I was bored,” Colby and Duncan said at the same time.

I thought about this for a minute, then shrugged and accepted it. “Which episode is this?”

“Part two of the Grave Digger thing with Stokes in that giant plastic box underground.”

I situated myself next to Colby as I brushed my wet hair, spraying him with the excess water. “How’d your guys’ presentation go yesterday for Madam?”

“She was freaking out it was so good,” he said, smiling widely. “We’re getting a hundred, no doubt.”

“We posted it on your YouTube Channel yesterday,” Duncan added, smiling just as bright. “Figured you’d want something of that high quality posted for all your followers to see.”

“Yeah, all 16 of them.” I thought for a second. “How did you get my password?”

“It’s your birthstone followed by the numbers ‘5515’,” Mayu said, still not looking up from the TV. “You told me that like 3 years ago.”

“Along with the part about ‘use this only if I like have amnesia and you think accessing my email will remind me who I am’, but I guess you forgot that part?”

“Nope, totally remembered it.”

I laughed. “Oh well. Just as long as you didn’t edit it to make me look crazy or anything.”

“No promises.”

It was ten Mountain Dews, three bags of chips, four bottles of salsa, and five hours before anyone spoke again.

“Is it just me, or have we been sitting her in silence for five hours?” Lux finally asked.

As a group, we looked at our cell phones, confirming her question with a group “yup” before returning to the continuing CSI.

“Shouldn’t we, like, do something?” she asked. As she stood, every one of her joints cracked loudly. “Damn, that feels good.”

“Why should we?” Colby asked back with a stretch. “Look, we’ve got one month before we have to start waking up at 7 to be at rehearsal by 8. I think it’s only fitting that we use the weekends we have left to watch Saturday morning marathons and pig out.”

“Come April 17, we’re going to be dancing non-stop, getting half an hour for lunch, and low-fat cream cheese bagels for breakfast.” Duncan rolled his eyes. “Might as well stock up on useless carbs and sugars while we still can.”

Lux sighed. “I would argue further, but today has been so lazy that I’m too sluggish to continue.” With that, she plopped back down on the couch.

I looked up from the three-foot long leg warmer I’d been knitting all morning. “We probably should do something. Who’s up for a road trip?”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know, but I’m bored!” I traded knitting needles for my laptop. “Let’s see what’s happening on Facebook.”

I was quite surprised to find, first on my news feed, a video that Colby had posted with almost a hundred ‘likes’ and about a hundred fifty comments.

“Wow, Cheese Boy,” I said with a laugh, “looks like someone’s blowing up your notifications.”

“Don’t call me Cheese Boy,” he said as he walked around to look over my shoulder, “and tell me what you’re talking about.”

“This video you posted yesterday.” I circled my mouse around the numbers and comments. “People love it.”

He gulped. “Um, did you see what video it is?”

“Nope.” I was too busy looking through the comments. “Tell me; I’m like halfway through this and I don’t want to find my place again.”

“It’s yours.”

This was a perfectly good reason to stop reading and make sure what he was saying was true. Sure enough, the title read “Cassandra Hathaway- Et Je Danse”.

I stared at it with an open mouth. “No way.”

“Check YouTube. Right now!”

“Oh god no!”

“Why the hell not?” He grabbed my laptop out of my hands and started typing ridiculously fast. “Don’t you want to know how many people actually watched it? I’m friends with like four hundred people! You could have four hundred views!”

By now, the other three had gathered around the laptop. I watched them stare at the screen while Colby typed. I could tell the exact second that they saw the view count. Duncan’s eyebrows shot into his hairline, Colby’s face drained of all color, Lux’s jaw dropped halfway to the floor, and Mayu started laughing uncontrollably.

“Cassie’s gone viral!” she cheered loudly. “In two days!”

Lux tried to say something a few times, but her mouth didn’t seem to want to work.

“Two days,” Duncan said weakly. “I’ve heard of this happening, but I didn’t actually think it was honest truth. Cassie is famous.”

“At least on the web,” Colby muttered. “How did this go crazy?” He paged back through the comments. “A lot of people think you’re hot, Cass. One or two complaining about the fact it’s in French. Lot of good comments about dancing and singing. A few jealous middle school girls calling you fat and untalented.”

I laughed. “Yay, just what I’ve always wanted. Now tell me how many views there are.”

“Hold on! There’s a considerable amount of saying that French is clearly not your first language. A lot of really good comments. Oh wow, one is someone saying that they saw you last year in PBT’s The Great Gatsby last November, and even in that small part you were great.”

“How many views?”

“There’s a bunch of people saying your clothes are pretty-”

“Tell me how many freaking views I got!” I finally gave up, bounced off the couch, and ran behind him, leering over his shoulder.

“873,941 views?” I asked. My eyebrows shot into my hair, my skin turned white, my mouth dropped open uncontrollably, I made a choking kind of laugh, and my knees gave out. “Over eight thousand likes?”

“Oh. My. God,” Lux finally said. “Only a hundred dislikes. Which, considering how many people have watched it? That’s insane. And half of those are probably just trolls. That’s… incredible.”

“This is something out of a movie,” I said so quietly it was almost a whisper. “I’m almost kind of famous.”

“At this rate, you’ll have over a million views by Tuesday,” Duncan said. “How did this happen?”

There was another minute of clicking before Colby answered. “From what I can tell, it started with Cassie’s followers and Madam, and after I posted it on Facebook, other people did. And it just spiraled out of control.”

I gave him a blank look. “You gave Madam my YouTube address?”

“She wanted to pass it on to some of her other students and fellow French teachers; what was I supposed to do?”

Mayu laughed and hugged me until I couldn’t breathe. “Cassie just went viral! This is so cool!”

We laughed and hugged for a minute. After that minute, we sat in silence.

“Well, now what?” Colby asked.

We all looked at each other and shrugged. “This is really anti-climactic,” Lux muttered.

“Resume CSI?” Duncan asked.

We all nodded. “Resume CSI,” we said together.

 

Duncan’s calculation was wrong. My video reached a million views at 11:53 Monday afternoon. I knew this because I had spent half my day in Wilkes’ room, and Mayu had programmed her computer to keep open a YouTube tab and refresh the page every 5 minutes. 

Wilkes was in the process of having a conversation with her freshmen English 1 CAS class. “Does anyone else have any comments about Great Expectations?”

I waved my hand frantically until she reluctantly called on me. “They should change the name to Great Excess Pages!”

She rolled her eyes at me as her freshmen laughed. “Cassie, that joke got old your freshmen year.”

“I’m just passing it on so that future generations can continue my comedic genius.” We rolled our eyes at each other and I resumed my game of Meepit Juice Break on Neopets. “Damn, I used to be so good at this game.” In exiting out of the game, I found myself staring at the view count. It took a second to compute, and then I screamed.

“What’s wrong?” Wilkes and half the freshmen asked.

“I just hit a million views!”

Wilkes, the only one who knew what that meant, smiled wide and stood up to hug me. “Cassie, congratulations! That’s wonderful!”

“I can’t believe this!” I started jumping in circles. “This is insane! Viral! A million hits in three days! And I’m featured on the home page under music!”

“Congrats, Cass. Really.” And with that, she resumed teacher her class.

Not for long, though.

“CASSIE!” Colby and Duncan yelled as they ran in the room.

“I know!” I yelled back. “How did you find out?”

“Madam was showing the class how popular it’d gotten,” Colby said as he threw his stuff down. “And everyone just kind of started freaking out, and she wrote us passes when we said we wanted to celebrate with you!”

“What are you two doing in my classroom?” Wilkes asked, going unnoticed. Her freshmen could only stare.

“A million hits!” I started jumping again. I stopped suddenly with a gasp. “Oh my god, I have to tell Lux and Mayu! They’re going to be so mad I didn’t tell them right away!”

“Done,” Duncan said, holding up his phone. “And Jo, Dakota, and Greg. Lux and Jo couldn’t get a pass from Physics, but Mayu-“

“Couldn’t get a pass, either,” she said herself as she walked in, “but decided that it didn’t matter because it was, after all, only class with the Good Doctor!”

“So you walked out?” a horrified freshman asked.

“Of course! What else was I supposed to do?” She jumped on my back, hanging like a monkey. “Cassie just got a million views on YouTube! She’s even more than viral!” She planted a sloppy kiss on my cheek, laughing as she dismounted

The freshmen now stared with a startled reverence as Duncan elaborated. “And now that you’ve hit a million, it’ll just keep climbing faster from there! You’re going to take the whole country by storm!”

Wilkes sighed and closed her book as Dakota and Greg ran in and simultaneously gave me high fives. “I guess there’s no more Charles Dickens for today. The group of you is corrupting my freshmen, slowly but surely.”

“Just as I promised,” Duncan chuckled.

Mayu jumped on the windowsill with a laugh. “There’s not very much that can be said about Great Excess Pages in the first place, Wilkes!” She propped her feet up on a nearby freshman’s desk with maniacal cackles. “We have an internet celebrity in our midst! There are much more interesting things going on now!”

“Pop is just going to have to wait for another day,” Duncan said with a smirk.

Wilkes sighed automatically. “His name is Pip.”

Another hour passed, with the freshmen leaving and Lux appearing, a two liter bottle of Mountain Dew magically appearing in her book bag.

“I’ve been holding on to this for, like, 36 hours,” she explained. “I mean, we need something to toast with, and since champagne is out of the question-”

“Mountain Dew trumps champagne on any given day anyways!” I said as I took the bottle. 

She dug cups out from Wilkes’ party supply stash and handed them out, even convincing a reluctant Wilkes to take one, despite her distaste for anything that would shut down her liver.

Duncan raised his glass. “Today we are watching a celebrity being born! To Cassie, who in her lifetime is sure to acquire thousands more views and a million more fans in the years to come!”

I laughed as my phone rang on Wilkes’ desk. Before I could pick it up, Duncan grabbed it. “Miss Cassandra Hathaway’s phone, this is her assistant speaking, do you have an appointment?” We laughed as he listened, slowly becoming confused. “Just a moment, may I put you on hold?” He covered the speaker with the palm of his hand. “Do you know an ‘Ellen’?”

I thought. “Isn’t she one of our ballerinas?”

Colby nodded. “Yeah, I think she’s the only decent freshman dancer.”

I smiled and took the phone. “Ellen? The ballerina?”

I heard laughing in the background and a vaguely familiar voice say with a chuckle, “Um, not exactly.”

“Wait, am I on speaker? Aren’t you in class?”

More laughter. “Cassie? Who do you think this is?”

“Ellen, right? You’re the only freshman who’s playing one of the ballerinas, right?”

They laughed again. “Cassie, this is Ellen Degeneres, calling from our studio.”

I rolled my eyes and looked around the room. “Okay, who is trolling me?”

“Who is it?” Mayu asked as she started jumping in circles. “And why are they trolling you?”

“Ellen Degeneres.”

They all laughed. Colby rolled his eyes. “I bet it’s just ballerina Ellen. Freshmen think they’re funny in the strangest ways.”

I turned back to the phone. “Okay, Ellen Degeneres. What up?”

“Well, Cassie, we were hoping that you would want to fly out here tomorrow and perform for our studio audience. We saw your video blowing up YouTube and are all becoming huge fans and everyone here would love to meet you.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yup, sounds like a plan.”

She laughed. “You’re really enthusiastic. Okay, I’m going to put you on hold and one of our producers will work all the details out with you.”

“Lovely. See you tomorrow.” I rolled my eyes as bad elevator music started playing in my ear. “Does she really expect me to believe that?”

“It’s like I said, she’s a freshman,” Colby shrugged. “Freshmen are awkward and weird and have a sense of humor that no one but other freshmen understands.”

“It’s true,” Wilkes confirmed unexpectedly. “I have 90 of them every day and, well, they’re just freshmen.”

I was about to make a comment, but a voice came on the phone. An unexpected, adult male voice. “Hello, Cassandra?”

“Wait what?”

“Is this Cassandra Hathaway?”

I felt my mouth drop. “Yes?”

“Okay, we’re really excited that you’ll come on the show with us. We’re going to fly you and a few people out here tomorrow morning; you’ll come in and do the show, and then have you back by Wednesday. How does that sound?”

I was almost speechless. “Yeah. Yeah. Good.”

“Great. Look, Ellen was hoping that at the beginning of the show you could do some dancing. Nothing like the intense ballet you were doing in your ‘Et Je Danse’ video, although that was great. But we saw another video on your channel- what was it- ‘Fireflies’, and we were hoping maybe you could do that one.”

“I- I- I can do that,” I stuttered.

Lux pulled on my arm. “What’s she saying? What’s going on?”

 “Cass, you look like you’ve been electrocuted,” Duncan said.

Dakota ran a cup of Mountain Dew under my nose. When I didn’t answer to it, her jaw dropped. “She’s in shock.”

I swatted them away as the man continued talking. “Your video is amazing, but we did our research and found out that your school is doing the Phantom of the Opera and you’re playing Christine. We saw one of your rehearsal videos of you guys doing ‘All I Ask of You’ and the reprise. Do you think you would be interested? You and, uh-” I heard him ruffle through his papers. “Oh, god, I’m blanking. What are their names? Your co-stars?”

I blinked a few times. I was never good at thinking on my feet. “Colby and Duncan?”

“Them.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, we can do that.”

“Excellent, what do you need for that?”

“Uh, well, a, uh, something to play the, uh, accompaniment recording?”

“No backups, no band?

“What? No, no, no, why would I need that?”

“Just checking. Okay, just tell me who’s coming with you and we’ll work out your travel details.”

I spend five minutes answering his questions with confused and dazed ‘yes’s and ‘no’s. By the time I hung up the phone, everyone in the room was staring at me, wide eyed with confusion. I knew how they felt, because I was feeling the exact same way. 

“What was that about?” Wilkes finally asked.

I could only stare in disbelief as I said, “I’m going on Ellen tomorrow.”

They stared back. Duncan was the first to speak. “Ellen? As in, you were actually speaking to Ellen Degeneres?”

Mayu’s eyes grew wide as she jumped around. “You just made a fool of yourself to Ellen! The Ellen!” She hugged me and hung off my back. “I’m coming with you!”

“What are you going to do?” Lux asked, prying Mayu away. 

“Dance. They want me to dance that point/modern combination I did to ‘Fireflies’ over the summer and had posted on my channel.” I slid into a chair. “And then sing ‘All I Ask of You’.” I saw dots swarm my vision. “Oh my god, I’m going to be on TV.”

“You’re going on Ellen?” Duncan said, boggle-eyed.

I shook my head. “Oh no. You and Colby are coming, too. They want us to do both of the ‘All I Ask of You’s’. Live.”

The boys could only stare as Mayu continued to laugh maniacally.

Lux jumped into action mode. “Okay, you’re going to need two outfits, one for the dance and one for the song. God I hope she doesn’t interview you after you’re all sweaty and disgusting, that’d be embarrassing. What are you wearing?”

“What? For? I mean, I don’t know!”

Mayu tilted her head and looked at me. “Do you even still remember that ‘Fireflies’ choreography you did?”

“I- sure, I- well I hope I-”

“Weren’t we still having problems with ‘All I Ask of You’?” the horrified Colby asked.

I thought for a second before I squeaked in horror. “Oh my god, what am I going to do?”

“We have to start planning.” Lux was always good at taking charge. “Make a list of everything you have in your closet, all your hair supplies, and all your shoes. As soon as school is over, we’ll rush-”

“I HAVE A PLAN!” Mayu yelled as she jumped two feet in the air. In one swift motion that I almost missed, she grabbed me with one hand, Lux with the other, and ran out of the room, leaving Wilkes staring as she registered what was happening. Colby, Duncan, Dakota and Greg raced after us, gathering their belongings and hastily grabbing what they could get of Lux’s and my haphazardly strewn things. Mayu ran as if she was running a marathon down the hall, around the corner and past the orchestra and chorus rooms, through a single door and into the parking lot. Up the hill near the auditorium, she slowed down, then came to a stop when she’d found my parked car. “No one ever guards that door!” she said as she finally let go of us. “Now we can go to Cassie’s house and plan!”

Lux, who was an obsessive when it came to school, looked horrified. “We can’t do that! That’s skipping! And not just skipping class, that’s actually leaving school without an approved excuse and dismissal!”

I, on the other hand, rolled my eyes and reached for my keys as the guys and Dakota caught up with us. They were not, however, in my pocket. “Nice one, Mayu; now we have to find a way back in to get my-”

In response, she popped open the car trunk and climbed in the driver’s seat with a jingle of my keys. “I thought of everything!” She honked the horn once. “I call driver!”

 

She claimed driver again, early the next morning.

“I’m driving!” she yelled as she spun through the house. She found me sitting at the edge of my bed, grumpy. “What are you doing up so early?”

I gestured to the bathroom. “Lux is doing my hair.”

She nodded. “Enough said.”

Lux was not a happy morning person. “Jesus, Cass, you hardly have anything for me to work with.”

“I gave you bobby pins, I gave you hairspray. That should be more than enough.”

She did something that was a cross between a yawn and a scoff. “Shows what you know.”

Mayu spun a few times in one of my chairs. “Did you check the video count yet?”

I attempted to nod as Lux pulled at my hair with a curler. “Sometime last night it hit three million.” I looked at Lux in the handheld mirror she’d brought. “What are you doing, and what am I wearing?”

“They’re called ‘pajamas’,” she said sarcastically. “And if you ask me, you could use some new ones. How much food have you spilled on those?”

I tried to give her a glare, which didn’t work well since she was focusing on pushing an insane amount of bobby pins into my scalp. “I mean, did you decide what I’m wearing on the show?”

“You’ll find that out later.” She examined a strand of my hair. “What kind of torture have you been inflicting on your beautiful brown tresses?”

“Tresses? What? Nothing!”

She raised her eyebrow.

“Okay, I straighten it. But that’s only because I’m a quarter Jewish and if I don’t my hair frizzes up to the size of the Hindenburg!”

Mayu cocked her head. “You’re Jewish?”

“Only on paper. Oh my god, are you trying to make me bleed?” With a little more struggling, I managed to get her to release me from her claws. “Are we picking up the boys on the way?”

“Nope!” Mayu said, hanging upside down off the edge of my bed now. “Duncan said that Colby will probably be done puking in the next five minutes, then they’re marathoning it over here.”

“Lovely,” I muttered. “Nothing like the smell of vomit to make your plane ride pleasurable.” I looked in the mirror. “Lux, what the hell did you do to me?”

“I made you attractive!” She fussed with the hair that she had piled high on my head. “Don’t mess with it, you’ll ruin it.” She gave the bangs that swept over my face a playful tug. “I’ll have to hurt you if you ruin my hard work.” She began packing a carry-on bag with the hair supplies.

“What, in the name of all that is caffeinated, are you doing with those torture supplies?”

“When the three of you sing, you’re going to have an entirely different look.” She tossed Mayu a duffle bag. “Throw your DS in there, that’s your carry-on.”

Mayu smiled widely. “What’s in here? Are there explosives?” She smiled and gasped. “Can you guys put me in a dog cage and check me so I can ride with the poodles?”

Lux and I had to exchange a look. “How could you possibly have made those trains of thought connect?” Lux asked as I rolled my eyes and packed my laptop.

“My trains are propelled by rocket boosters!” she yelled as she jumped on the bed. She attempted to flop down next to me, but only succeeded in rolling off the bed. Lux rolled her eyes and walked into the bathroom as I laughed. “You should get real clothes on!” she said as she climbed to my desk chair, knocking several books off it. “You’re going to go on the plane looking like a total mess who can’t feed herself!” She began spinning as she spoke. “And then when you walk into the studio in California everyone will be judging you and they’ll laugh and your career will be over before it starts!”

I stood up with a sigh, grudgingly thinking that she was right, and throwing my oversized pajama shirt off and digging though my drawers. “This seemed so much less stressful yesterday. Why did I do this? This seemed like such a good idea at the time!”

“Because this is the gateway to fame,” Lux said as she walked back in, her hair somehow perfectly styled in under a minute. “Whoa, Cassie, pants check!”

I stuck my tongue out and threw my sweat pants at her in response. “Oh please. You’ve seen me more naked than this before.”

“And the fact that that is true should probably worry me, but it won’t.” Lux situated herself on my bed. “Who wants to stop for breakfast on the way?”

I stopped my clothing search to point at Mayu, who was poking holes in a water bottle with some spare pins. “I am not letting that disaster of a best friend drive or eat in my car, let alone both at the same time.”

“Oh come on!” Mayu sighed dramatically. “I’m not a total disaster! And I’m a good driver! I’ve never even been-”

Before she could finish, Duncan and Colby walked in my room. We looked at each other for a second before we all started screaming, them making a beeline for the hall and me grabbing desperately for any form of clothing I could use to cover myself.

“-arrested,” Mayu finished once the screams had ceased. “Cassie, the boys are here.”

“CASSIE!” Colby yelled from somewhere unseen. “Put some damn pants on!”

“I was in the process of doing that, damn it!” I changed into shorts faster than I ever had before. “You guys should have yelled Pants Check!”

“Your mom said Lux and Mayu were already up here!” Duncan yelled, risking a peek around the corner as I snapped a bra on. “We didn’t think we’d be walking into a lesbian orgy!”

Lux sighed. “First of all, it would be a threesome. Second, you’re theatre people. Your ancestors were prostitutes, you spend half your time hanging out in dressing rooms, and I know for a fact that you’ve seen more boobs than that just from costume fittings.”

Colby slinked into the room as I finally slid into a long sleeved shirt. “Still doesn’t make it any better.”

“It’s like seeing my sister naked,” Duncan muttered. “And I don’t even have a sister.”

Lux set to work fixing Colby’s hair. He tossed a bag to her. “These are the only nice clothes I have. I don’t know if they’re going to match Cassie’s.”

“Too bad we couldn’t borrow our costumes from Wilkes,” Duncan said with a yawn. “That would be epic beyond words.”

“You guys use the word ‘epic’ too liberally,” Lux muttered. “Anyways, don’t worry about it. I bought everything you’ll need to match last night at the thrift store. Wilkes said there was no way in hell she was letting those costume pieces fly across the country.”

“Besides, I doubt we could ever have the luck to bring them back unharmed,” I muttered, pulling on Uggs. 

“A path of destruction follows me wherever I go!” Mayu yelled triumphantly as she jumped on my bed, pointed forward, and darted out of my room. “And today I will be on the parkway!” we heard her say from halfway through the garage door.

We reluctantly followed, only to find that she had, in fact, taken over the front seat, and had her iPod playing a loud Japanese half pop, half screamo song.

“What is this?” I yelled over the noise.

“Chu Chu Lovely Muni Muni Mura Mura Purin Purin Boron Nururureroreo!” she yelled back at a thousand words per minute.

“You do realize it’s seven in the goddamn morning, right?” Colby yelled back as we clicked our seatbelts. “And that you don’t speak a word of Japanese?”

Mayu only laughed, peeled out of the garage, and sped towards the airport.

We arrived with little incident, other than a mildly annoyed Lux’s economy sized bottle of hairspray being taken by a mildly annoyed TSA agent, and before I even knew what was happening, the rehearsals had finished and we were chilling in the green room, waiting for our cues.

Okay, ‘chilling’ is the ultimate wrong word. While I had a panic attack, Colby suffered a bigger panic attack, and Duncan fought the most extreme panic attack I’d ever seen.

“Why are you two freaking out more than I am?” I half asked, I half yelled. “I’m the one who has to dance and sing!”

“Yeah, but you’ve been training for this your entire life,” Colby said between deep breaths. “I never had any plans of being on national television. Especially not with Ellen.”

Duncan was too busy breathing into a paper bag to answer.

“Cassie?” a voice from the door asked. A happy and well-dressed assistant smiled in at us. “We’re ready for you.”

I took another deep breath and swallowed the lump in my throat. “Right. Awesome.”

She led me backstage, unlike any backstage I’d ever seen. As I readjusted my blue and black knee-high leg warmers, I could hear Ellen- the Ellen- talking to her audience.

“I showed y’all her video yesterday,” she was saying, “which has been blowing up YouTube all week and reached over four million views this morning.”

I did not know that fact, and had to stop myself from passing out.

“Today, she agreed to come and sing for us, which of course will happen later in the show. But until then, she’s going to do one of my favorite things: Cassandra Hathaway is going dance.”

I got my cue as the music started. Three minutes went by entirely too fast. Switching between pointe toes and flat feet, I spun through illusions and fortes that had everyone cheering. I did jumps that a track star could be proud of, landing perfectly every time. There were body rolls and shimmies thrown in, jerky hip-hop moves and smooth and balanced ballet, married together so that they drove the crowd wild.

Even I had to admit that Lux knew what she was doing when she picked my clothes. I felt amazing, whipping around in a blue and black blur. The lights were hot and glorious, and it was perfect in every way shape and form. The applause was a drug to me. As the final chorus ended, I went into a long, drawn out spin, nearly bending over backwards as the upper half of my body moved smoothly with the words. With the last beat, I stopped. The audience went insane as I bowed. Ellen came over and stood next to me, addressing them.

“Cassandra Hathaway!” She was smiling almost as widely as I was. “We’ll talk to her later and hear the lead cast from her production of Phantom of the Opera! Don’t go away!”

“I’m going to die,” Duncan said, taking a break from his gasping breaths when I walked in the room. “How did it go?”

“Amazing. Fantastic. Unbelievable.” I jumped onto the couch with both feet, giddy and giggly. “They loved me and everything I did. And Ellen is the sweetest person I have ever met on the planet. She was just gushing about it all after the filming. There’s someone famous out there now, and we’ve got about half an hour before we’re on- Lux, what are you doing?”

She had begun undoing all her hard work, my hair tumbling down my shoulders. “I have half an hour to make you beautiful, I’m not going to waste a minute of it.”

“I thought I was beautiful!” 

“You were hot,” she corrected, pulling hard at the thickly sprayed hair. “Now I have to make you as beautiful as these boys.”

Once she’d said that, I noticed they had been dressed up. Colby wore light ivory dress pants and a light gold satin shirt that shimmered when he moved. His hair had been tamed by the magic that was Lux, and his black leather dress shoes gave him another inch on me. Duncan sat opposite him, his hair also neater than usual and dressed in surprisingly nice black pants. He, however, wore a suit jacket over an ivory shirt, a light gold vest under the jacket and gold cuff links and buttons as accents. Like Colby, he was also an inch or two taller than usual.

“I can only assume this means I’m wearing a gold dress?” I asked through gritted teeth.

Lux paused from her torture to pull a hanger out from the bathroom.

“Will I ever stop you from going through my closet?” I muttered. “That’s my Christmas dress.”

“Yes, yes it is.” She tossed me the hanger. “And it looks good on you. Go put it on.”

I sighed as I stripped down.

“Not here!”

“Theatre person,” I said simply. The dress made from my favorite McCall’s pattern, was smooth and cotton, and fell just below my knees. Small gold holly vines and leaves danced across the ivory background. I tied the long separate belt just under the bodice and into a large bow in the back. I spun once, and it circled out around me.

“Lovely,” Mayu said. I only then noticed she was jumping on a couch. “You look stunning, dashing, gorgeous and marvelous.”

“I’m kind of amazed they haven’t kicked you out yet,” I said as I sat down again. Lux immediately began attacking my hair again. “You know, if you hadn’t put so much guck in my hair before, you wouldn’t be in the process of single handedly scalping me.”

“’Scalping’ would imply that I’m removing the skin from your skull.”

“Well, you’re damn close to it.”

She ignored me, as such is Lux’s nature, and continued to twist thick curls into my hair, using even more hairspray than necessary. I became convinced, by the time the brush was set down, that Lux had been the soul creator of the hole in the ozone layer.

Also by the time she was done, there were only moments to spare. “Put these on,” Lux demanded, tossing a pair of gold and ivory strappy heels at me. Rather than argue, I slipped them on and stumbled around the room. Again all too soon, we were led out to the audience, alive with murmurs and chatter in the commercial break.

We set up carefully and quickly; I stood stage left in front of a standing mic, Colby stood stage right with his standing mic, and Duncan stood with his head down and hands held behind his back. Duncan was the only one with a mic in his hands.

The cameras started rolling, and Ellen spoke to the camera. “You saw the amazing Cassandra Hathaway dance for us, and soon she will be staring as Christine Daaé in Taylor Allderdice High School’s production of The Phantom of the Opera. Here with her friends and fellow cast members Colby Tatum and Duncan Topezuvjwa -“ she did a wonderful job of butchering Duncan’s Russian last name, just like everyone who attempted to pronounce it “-the leads of Allderdice’s production of Phantom, performing ‘All I Ask of You.’”

The walls parted, and our accompaniment track began playing. Mayu had been up half the night cutting the ornamental orchestral parts, which would take up too much of our performance. As little practice as he had had with the new track, Colby began on cue.

_“No more talk of darkness,”_  he sang, his deep voice echoing charmingly, “ _forget these wide-eyed fears. I’m here, nothing can harm you. My words will warm and calm you.”_  He looked at the audience, smiling comfortingly towards them, holding his hands out as though he were hold mine in his.  _“Let me be your freedom, let daylight dry your tears. I’m here, with you, beside you. To guard you and to guide you.”_

I smiled carefully out, just as Colby was. “ _Say you’ll love me every waking moment. Turn my head with talk of summertime. Say you need me with you now and always. Promise me that all you say is true.”_  I took another step towards my mic, smiling up as though I was looking at Colby. “ _That’s all I ask of you-”_

_“Let me be your shelter, let me be your light. You’re safe. No one will find you. Your fears are far behind you.”_

_“All I want is freedom; a world with no more night. And you, always beside me, not hold me and to hide me.”_

He got louder, his smile wider than ever.  _“Then say you’ll share with me one love, one lifetime! Let me lead you from your solitude! Say you need me with you now and always! Anywhere you go, let me go too. Christine, that’s all I ask of you-“_

_“Say you’ll share with me one love, one lifetime! Say the word and I will follow you!”_

_“Share each day with me, each night, each morning!”_  we sang together.

_“Say you love me?”_  I asked him.

_“You know I do!”_

_“Love me,”_  we sang to each other almost quietly, “ _that’s all I ask of you.”_

We froze, having cut the last part of the song for time. In its place, Duncan looked up sadly and walked between us.

_“I gave you my music,”_  he sang softly,  _“made your song take wing. And now, how you’ve repaid me: denied me and betrayed me.”_  I could have sworn he actually going to cry.  _“He was bound to love you when he heard you sing… Christine…”_

Colby and I sang again, quietly, moving slowly and ghostlike as Duncan grew sadder and angrier. “ _Say you’ll share with me one love, one lifetime. Say the word and I will follow you. Share each day with me, each night, each morning-“_

“ _You will curse the day you did not do,_ ” Duncan practically yelled,  _“all that the Phantom asked… of… you!”_

Before he’d even stopped singing, there was more wild applause. Cheering and whistles filled the air as we took our bows, Colby, me, then Duncan, culminating into a deep group bow. I looked at the boys, laughing at the thought of their panic attacks in the green room.

Ellen came over and smiled. “When we come back, we’re going to talk to these amazing performers, don’t go away!”

True to her word, we were soon sitting on a bright red couch, smiling and laughing and talking. She turned to me.

“So Cassie, why don’t you tell us about the video that has skyrocketed you into the spotlight?”

I was praying you couldn’t see my knees shaking. “Well, Colby and Duncan came to me and needed help with their French project. And since I’m such a wonderful friend, I agreed!”

The audience laughed.

“And the boys did the easy part?”

Colby laughed. “If you can figure out how to use Audacity and ES6 Edit Studio in half a week, then you have permission to call what we did ‘easy’.”

“And let’s hear from Duncan for a minute. I understand this is your first year at Allderdice and you already got the part of the Phantom! How did you manage that?”

“I’m immensely talented, undeniably charming, and drop dead gorgeous,” he said simply, chuckling when I swatted at him. “Actually, Cassie and I had a rough start and at my audition, since she is student director, we sang together. And according to our director, we had ‘undeniable chemistry’.”

“In all actuality, I was just trying to stop myself from slapping him,” I added.

“And you have some representatives from your tech crew here too? Why don’t we check in on them?”

Oh god; our techies. I exchanged a horrified look with the boys. “Mayu’s been arrested, hasn’t she?”

“She ran away, right?” Colby said with a sigh.

Duncan pulled out his wallet. “How expensive was whatever she broke?”

The audience, not realizing how completely serious we were, laughed as a video showed Lux and Mayu, sitting in the green room- reading.

My mouth dropped.

“I’m sorry, I think you have the wrong people,” Colby said politely. “That may be our Lux, but the Japanese one can’t be Mayu. There’s no chaos, panic, disorder, mayhem-“

Mayu then set her book aside to pick up a banana and eat it- with her bare foot.

Duncan nodded. “That’s more like it.”

“Do you mind me asking where she got the banana?”

I thought for a second. “You can ask, feel free to. But we really don’t have any answer.”

She laughed. “Taylor Allderdice’s production of The Phantom of the Opera runs in Pittsburgh May 6th through the 9th! If you miss it, don’t worry, because I’m sure this isn’t the last you’ll hear from any of these great performers! I’ll see ya’ll tomorrow! Be kind to one another!”

 

Our ride back was nonstop chatter and chirping. With Lux at the wheel, we sped down the parkway and towards the city.

“That was. So. Incredible!” I said for the thousandth time. “As soon as we get to the school, we are checking YouTube and seeing how many views I’ve got!”

“Crossing 8 million,” Mayu sang, not even looking up from her phone. “Jo just texted me. She said that half the teachers stopped class just to watch you.”

“No way!”

“Well, they used those TVs that have been passed around since Roosevelt was president, but yes. They watched you, and they watched the war of the black and white ants!”

I laughed. “I feel infinite! This is the coolest thing that has ever happened to me!”

Colby turned around from the passenger’s seat. “You know what would be perfect right now?”

“Enlighten me.”

“Pulling a Perks.”

Duncan raised an eyebrow next to me. “Why do I get the feeling Colby just suggested we rob a pharmacy?”

“No, dumbass, The Perks of Being a Wallflower?”

“Dude, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” Lux answered almost absentmindedly, not even taking her eyes off the road. “An epistolary novel by Stephen Chbosky published in 1999 by MTV. Set in Pittsburgh in 1991 and 1992. Gained fame as one of the most controversial and frequently challenged books in America and because of the line Cassie is quoting, which is said in the Liberty Tubes.”

We stared at her.

“And do you happen to know the ISBN?” Colby asked sarcastically.

“No, but the original edition was 256 pages in paperback.”

I thought about it for a second. “Okay! Let’s pull a Perks!”

Duncan watched horrified as Colby opened the station wagon’s sunroof and I crouched under it. I could hear Lux muttering in the front, “This is a bad idea. This is such a bad idea. I’m going to be arrested,” as we approached the Liberty Tunnels. There was hardly any traffic to speak of when we crossed into the dimly lit tunnel and, as soon as I had adjusted, I held on to the side of the roof and stood up.

The wind whipped my hair around me, stinging my face and burning my eyes. I lifted my arms out to my sides and let them glide. Call it dangerous, call me stupid, call it overdone, but I knew that Chbosky had gotten it right:

“In that moment, I swear we were infinite.”

“What do you think about ‘Masquerade’?” Wilkes asked me two weeks later. I was sitting in her room, skipping my Web Design class and kitting a bonnet- my final costume piece and one of the absolute final costume pieces in general.

I thought for a minute. “I like it. The staircase works really well, and no one’s fallen down it since that one crew guy when we first practiced with it. Why?”

“What about ‘Hannibal’? Nah, the ending to that is too anti-climactic.”

“Wilkes, what the hell are you talking about?”

She waved her script at me. “I’m trying to pick a song for the Kelly Awards in case we get nominated for Best Musical and have to perform.”

“In case? Try ‘when’.” I thought for a minute. “Isn’t it kind of early to be doing this?”

If she had looked up any faster, her neck would have snapped. “Cassie, do you know what today is?”

“Tuesday?”

“For one thing, it’s Thursday. For another, it’s April 22. Opening night is two weeks from today.” She raised her eyebrow. “You do know that next week is tech week, right?”

I did not know that. But I did make it loud and clear when I walked into rehearsal late that afternoon.

“NEXT WEEK IS TECH WEEK!” I yelled so that my voice echoed off the walls and instantly shut everyone up. “Expect practices to last to ten, dinner break to be a half hour tops, and no one will go to the bathroom for anything short of passing a kidney stone!”

They rolled their eyes and resumed conversations as I took my normal spot on the stage, stretching next to Duncan.

“So I take it I’m going to meet Serious Cassie next week?” he asked while I began stretching out my quads.

“Babe, you can’t even imagine what serious looks like.”

“Babe? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That you’re the sexiest man I’ve ever known the likes of.”

“What?”

“I have no idea.”

He rolled his eyes. “I take it this means no more impromptu songs or crazy dance routines.”

“Absolutely not. All the fun and games are over. Serious time is now.”

“I thought you might say that.” He stood up and waved to the balcony. “Hey Mayu, you up there!”

“Of course I am!” she yelled as she ran down the balcony stairs, stopping just short of doing a magnificent dive headfirst into the house below. “Are we surprising Cassie now?”

“Yup!” He laughed at my horrified face. “I just thought that maybe you need one more chance to be goofy and sing with no agenda. I know you have to know this song, since you already knew the musical when we did my audition.”

“What?”

Instead of answering, he gestured towards Mayu, who did something on her computer that it began a song I instantly recognized as ’96,000’ from In the Heights- and as Duncan said, I did know this musical.

_“96, 000,”_  he sang, gesturing to Colby and Eric, who had eagerly been awaiting their cues.

_“Damn!”_  they sang simply.

_“96,000!”_

_“Dollars? Holla!”_  Eric, the whitest person on the planet sang.

_“96,000!”_

_“Yo, somebody won?”_  Colby asked as he jumped on the stage with us.

_“96,000…”_

Unbeknownst to me, Colby could rap, and he did so while the rest of the cast cheered him on.  _“Yo, if I won the lotto tomorrow, well I know I wouldn’t bother going on no spending spree! I’d pick a business school and pay the entrance fee; then maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll stay friends with me! I’ll be a businessman richer than Nina’s daddy! Donald Trump and I on the links and he’s my caddy! My money’s making money! I’m going from poor to mo’ dough! Keep the bling; I want the brass ring like Frodo!”_

Duncan began mocking his dancing. _“Oh no, here goes Mr. Braggadocio! Next thing you know, you’re lying like Pinocchio!”_

_“Yo, if you’re scared of the bull, stay out the rodeo!”_

_“Yo, I got more hoes than a phone book in Tokyo!”_  Andrew, one of our freshmen sang as he jumped on the stage to laughter and applause.

Duncan and Colby could only stare for a second before Duncan laughed.  _“Ooh, you better stop rapping, you not ready! It’s gonna get hot and heavy and you already sweaty!”_

_“Yo- yo- yo-!”_

_“’Yo- yo!’ I’m sorry, is that an answer? Shut up, go home, and pull your damn pants up!”_  He turned back to Colby, who was laughing. “ _As for you, Mr. Frodo of the Shire, 96 Gs ain’t enough to retire!”_

_“Come on, I’ll have enough to knock your ass off its axis!”_

_“You’ll have a knapsack full of jack after taxes!”_

Eric began running down the aisles, yelling.  _“96,000!”_

_“Aye! Alabanza!”_  Mayu yelled down with a wink.

_“96, 000_!”

Jo and Dakota jumped onstage. _“No me diga!”_

_“96,000!”_

_“I never win shit!”_  I sighed as I tore up my imaginary ticket.

_“96,000!”_  he yelled as he ran into the hall to applause and laughter.

Colby took over again.  _“For real, though: imagine how it would feel going real slow down the highway of life with no regrets!”_  He sighed.  _“And no breaking your neck for respect or a paycheck! For real though, I’ll take a break from the wheel and we’ll throw the biggest block party, everybody here needs a weekend where we can breathe, take it easy!”_

Mayu, Lux, and Greg yelled from the balcony, “ _Yo, mom, it’s me! Check our tickets!”_  Everyone laughed at Greg’s incredible cracking falsetto.

_“One two three,”_  Dakota sang, skipping across the stage,  _“what would you do with 96Gs?_

_“Who, me?_ ” Jo asked as she examined her fingernails.

_“I mean, if it’s just between you and me?”_

_“Esa pregunta es tricky!”_

_“I know!”_

_“96Gs? I’d start my life with a brand new lease!”_  Jo, in the full spirit of a theatre person, grabbed her boobs to laughter and cheers.

_“Ooh!”_

_“Atlantic City with a Malibu Breeze-“_

_“And a brand new weave!”_

_“Or maybe just bleach?”_

I separated them. _“Y’all are freaks.”_

_“Yo, I’m just saying_ ,” Duncan said with a sigh.  _“It’s silly when we get into these crazy hypotheticals. You really want some bread, then go ahead: create a set list, go and cross ‘em off the list as you pursue ‘em. And with those 96, I know precisely what I’m doing!”_

I poked at him and giggled. _“What’cha doing?”_

_“What am I doing? What am I doing? It takes most of that cash just save my ass from financial ruin! Sonny can keep the coffee brewing. I’ll spend a few on you ‘cause the only room with a view is a room with you in it!”_  He winked at me.  _“And I can give Abuela Claudia the rest of it! Just fly me down to Puerto Plata; I’ll make the best of it!”_  He turned to Eric, who emerged from backstage after having run the halls.  _“You really love this business?”_

_“NO!”_

_“Tough, Merry Christmas! You’re now the youngest tycoon in Washington Hiz-nets!”_

Eric motioned for Andrew to come over and, in a style typical of freshmen and Graffiti Pete, interrupt him after ever other sentence.  _“Yo with 96,000 I’d finally fix housing! Give the barrio computers with wireless web browsing! The kids are living without a good edumication! Change the station, teach them about gentrification! The rent is escalating-”_

_“What!”_

_“The rich are penetrating-”_

_“What!”_

_“We pay our corporations when we should be demonstrating!”_

_“What!”_

_“What about immigration?”_

_“What!”_

_“Politicians be hating!”_

_“What!”_

_“Racism in this nation’s gone from latent to blatant!”_

Everyone cheered as he went on. “ _I’ll cash my ticket and picket, invest in protests! Never lose my focus ‘til the city takes notice! And you know this, man! I’ll never sleep because the ghetto has a million promises for me to keep-!”_

_I gave him the kind of look I would give a puppy. “You are so cute!”_

He blushed a little.  _“I was just… thinking off the top of my head…”_

Duncan pointed to me. “ _96K; go.”_

_“If I win the lottery, you’ll never see me again!”_

_“Damn, we only joking. Stay broke then-”_

_“I’ll be downtown! I’ll get a nice studio, and get out of the barrio. If I win the lottery you’ll wonder where I’ve been-”_

Everyone’s verses started melding into one, rap on top of rap, and song on top of song. The beat picked up, and everyone, on stage and in the audience, started dancing as we cycled through each verse another time until…

_“Whoa,”_  we all sang. “ _Whoa!”_

_“I’ll be downtown-“_

_“We could pay off the debts we owe!_ ” the boys sang.

_“We could tell everyone we know!”_  us girls echoed back.

_“I could get on a plane and go!”_  Duncan said as he picked me up and artistically flipped me, gaining a round of applause from those watching and a slightly stunned look from me.

_“We’d be swimming in dough, yo!”_

_“No tiptoeing, we’ll get the dough, and once we get going, we’re never gonna-”_  everyone started whispering.  _“No tiptoeing, we’ll get the dough, and once we get going we’re never gonna-_

_“96,000!”_  we sang at the top of our lungs.  _“96,000!_

_“We’ll get the dough and once we get going, we’re never gonna stop!”_

The notes crashed to an end. We jumped, we cheered, we laughed, and after a minute, Duncan took center stage.

“Okay!” His face was suddenly cold and serious. “Playtime is over! We open in two weeks! Get everyone in costumes and be out here within the next ten minutes! Stage crew, set up the opening scene and get ready to run the ‘Hannibal’ transition! Let’s move!” He smiled at me as the cast and crew obediently jumped to work in a rushed panic. “You think we’re ready for this, Christine?”

I took a breath and walked backstage with him to get our costumes on. “I really hope so.”


	7. Act VI: The Phantom of the Opera

The auditorium was empty, save for me, Lux, Mayu, Colby, and Duncan.

“ECHO!” Mayu yelled as the door crashed closed. When she didn’t get a reply, she sighed. “This auditorium sucks. I wanted to talk to my twin.”

Lux raised an eyebrow. “I’ve got one of those, and trust me: it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

I tramped through the aisle and threw my bags on the stage. “Can you believe it, guys? We’re actually here. It’s actually opening night of our senior musical.” I jumped up on the stage and spread my arms wide. “It’s the beginning of the end.”

“CUE DRAMATIC MUSIC!” Mayu yelled.

“Oh hush.” I plopped down on the apron and crossed my legs. “You know it’s horrifically exciting. And sad. And totally overwhelming.”

Duncan nodded. “I haven’t even been here a year and it’s freaking me out.” He sat next to me. “First this, then graduation, then summer, then college.” He gave Lux a hand up and she sat on my other side. “Where are you off to, Lux?”

“Iowa,” she said simply. “I’m thinking about some kind of writing. Going in undecided, I’ll figure it out later.

Colby and Mayu sat down and made a circle. “It feels like this day would never come,” Colby said. “I told my parents to make the deposit at Princeton last night.”

We all stared. “Princeton?” Duncan finally stuttered.

“Yeah! It’s a good school!”

“How did you, of all people, get into Princeton?”

“I have exceptional grades and many wonderful activities that they feel would contribute to the atmosphere of the campus,” he said, sounding like he was quoting from his acceptance letter.

Lux gestured to me. “Well we all know were Cassie is going.”

“NYU,” they chorused.

I shook my head.

They gasped as a group.

“It’s too expensive, and I don’t qualify for enough grants or scholarships,” I said simply. “Here I can get five thousand a year from the Pittsburgh Promise to start with. I’m going to CMU; they’re giving me major scholarships. My school color is going to be plaid and there will be people playing bagpipes.”

They laughed.

“And where is the amazing Mayu going?” Colby asked.

“Japan!” she said with a broad smile. “I’m taking a semester break to go visit some family that I’ve never met before, see the sights, and ‘reconnect with my inner Japanese person’.” She sighed with a smile. “I’m as Japanese as they come; I can do high-level programming off the top of my head, and if that isn’t Japanese I don’t know what it.”

“And your brothers?”

“Will be remaining here and turning my bedroom into a game room so that they can host ‘Left 4 Dead 2-sdays’. Also, I have to apply for schools while I’m in Japan! It’s not even going to be a vacation, more like an endless string of delays!” She didn’t mind, really, and it showed in her smile.

I turned to my left. “And finally we come to Duncan. What’s next for the man who has done nothing?”

He laughed. “Edinboro!”

We all stared.

“You’re going to Edinboro?” Colby asked. “Isn’t that an imaginary school?” He looked at me and made the international sign for crazy.

“It’s a good school!” Duncan laughed again. “Besides, I’m thinking I’m going to transfer. Think of it as something just to get my feet wet, to figure out what I’m doing. To find my place in the world without spending $40,000 a year.”

I smiled. “And I hear they have some great parties up there.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” But he smiled, too.

Lux sighed. “God, I never thought I’d say this, but I’m actually going to miss this place! There are so many stories we have and things we’ve done!”

“Remember that riot last year?” Colby asked with a laugh. “Where like twenty three people got arrested because of a basketball game? And a security guard got sent to the hospital because he fell on a pencil?”

Duncan gave him a horrified look. “The fact that you say that with a laugh has me completely petrified.”

“How about the food fight our freshmen year?” Mayu added. “Remember how I got the senior VP covered in ranch dressing? That was the coolest thing I’ve ever done!”

“Or last year, when the entire junior class had that dragon as our Senior Project Advisor?” Lux added with a giggle. “Not even Cassie could get out of doing work for that one!”

“Aux contraire,” I corrected. “She may have bitched at me daily, but I did exactly half an hour of work for that project, and the panel of teachers passed me with a ‘proficient’. Which is more than we can say for Mayu’s math PSSAs!”

She wrinkled her nose at me. “I was off by one question! Then I got stuck in that stupid BS math all first semester of this year.”

“It’s SB, not BS. Standards Basic?”

“No no, no, no no no no. It was BS math.”

“Who can blame her?” Duncan muttered. “They give us so many damn standardized tests. At Baldwin, I was famous among the teachers and students. For each and every standardized test they gave me, I answered ‘D’ for all the multiple choice questions and filled every essay with only the letter ‘d’.”

Mayu stood up and fell to her knees in front of him. “I had no idea, all this time; I’ve been in the company of such a genius. All I could come up with was the lyrics to ‘Under the Sea.’”

“Which is equally impressive.”

We sat in silence for a bit, no one sure what to say next or what to do. It was too early to start getting in costume, too early to start running sound checks, too early to get into makeup, too early to do anything but wait.

“Hey guys?” Lux asked. “Let’s make a blood pact.”

I gulped at the word. “Did you say blood?”

“Yeah!” She smiled and leaned in closer. “You make a little cut on your palm and hold it up to the other person’s, and it makes you blood brothers. And it’s saying you’ll keep a promise for the rest of your life.”

Before I could even say anything, everyone else had decided they were in. Mayu even produced a Swiss army knife. They looked at me.

I sighed. “I guess I’m in. But if the blood makes me faint, I’m blaming it on you.”

Mayu passed the knife to Lux “What are we promising?” She asked.

“That no matter what happens, we’re going to be friends,” she said. “Wherever we go, whoever we meet, whatever happens to us, we’re always going to stick together.” She made a small cut on the palm of each of her hands before passing it on to Duncan. 

Colby followed her lead with the knife. “That you’ll call when you’re happy, when you’re sad, and everything in between. That I won’t be just a shoulder to cry on, I’ll be a friend to laugh with, celebrate with, and eat fattening food while watching bad movies with.” 

“That I can always be weird around you guys,” Mayu said, “because you’ll never really grow up. That we can still play with bubbles when we’re sixty, and race our electric wheelchairs when we’re eighty, and be on the jungle gym before our kids.” She passed the knife, careful not to get blood on her jeans. “And that, while my kids may think I’m the crazy old chinchilla lady, you’ll always laugh if I have my chinchillas in my boobs.”

“That whatever becomes of us ten, twenty, fifty years down the road,” Duncan continued, laughing a little, “I can still call you guys up and go out for a night and it’ll be like we never left each other.”

I nodded. “That you never knock on my door, you always walk right in. You don’t ask if you can eat my food, you go to the fridge and act like it’s your own. You don’t pick me up when I fall, you laugh and make fun of me and then see if I’m okay.” I squeamishly made the same little cuts, looking pointedly away from the blood with a pathetic whimper. ”That if we ever get married, or ever have kids, we still act like family.”

Lux grabbed one of my hands and pressed our palms together, doing the same to Colby on her other side. Duncan took my other hand and one of Mayu’s, and Mayu finished the circle by taking Colby’s only free hand.

We sat there like that for a minute, looking at each other, smiling, lost in our own thoughts again. As melodramatic as it seemed like we were being, it felt perfect. And even if we hadn’t made the blood pact, I knew that these were the friends I was going to have for the rest of my life; this moment was one of the ones I was going to remember until my dying day.

The trance was broken by the slamming of the auditorium door; Wilkes walked in and waved.

“What are you guys doing here so early?”

I smiled. “It’s opening night of our senior show, Wilkes!” I jumped off the stage and spun around. “We’re going to make everything perfect!”

 

I pulled my hair back with a large gold ribbon as I stared in the mirror. Jo was next to me, working on her own bow. She smiled in the mirror.

“Aren’t we adorable?”

I nodded slowly as I fixed my bow. “We’re so cute it’s criminal.” Consulting my tackle box of Ben Nye, I did one more adjustment on my highlights and shadows before putting a layer of powder over it all. I stood back and swooshed my skirt a few times. A few deep breaths. “The moment of truth.”

From somewhere down the back hallway, a voice yelled, “Doors are opening! Half way to sold out! Half hour call!”

“Okay, so half an hour away from the moment of truth.” I looked around the dressing room. “Any guys who didn’t get their makeup raise your hands!”

Two or three of them half-heartedly raised their hands, and Jo grabbed my extra makeup kits and immediately got to work on them.

I adjusted my mic and sat next to Colby. His face was slightly more orange than usual, and we’d marked in highlights in shadows; he would look normal onstage, but right now, he just looked tired.

“I. Hate. Makeup,” he said, trying not to move his face too much.

Hearing this, Duncan turned around. “Dude, I don’t want to hear it.” He was in the process of gluing his prosthetics to his face, which was a long and annoying process. Half his face was covered in the Spirit Gum, which would be hell and a half to get off at the end of the show. “And after this, I have to get that damn putty on my face to keep the mask on!”

I jumped up. “I can get that!” We stood in a triangle as Duncan struggled with his prosthetics and I worked putty makeup onto the edge of the half-faced mask I had made from thermoplastic to perfectly fit his face.

I looked around the room. It was the boy’s dressing room, the larger of the two, and most of the cast was here. The two mirrors were taken by those doing last minute make up touches, but we were the only ones surrounding the full length mirror; there seemed to be a reverent circle around it, allowing the three leads their space to prepare. I watched as Colby pressed the plastic scars onto Duncan’s face, laughing when it looked like they were hitting one another.

“And the piece-de-resistance!” I took the mask and gently put it on his face, but it wouldn’t stay. “Oh, wait, hold on.” I took the back of his head and smashed it forward into the mask, as if I was smashing his face into a pie.

“Ow.”

“Sorry.” I straightened him up and adjusted his black velvet cape. “Alright, Mister Phantom Man, you’re good and ready.”

All too soon, we were standing in the wings, waiting. Two of our ‘ballerinas’ were out on the apron in front of the curtain, telling our completely sold out audience to please silence their cell phones. Someone had even said Wilkes had had to seat people in the balcony, which had never happened before.

The lights dimmed.

The overture played. 

“This is it,” I whispered to Colby, grabbing tight at his arm.

The curtains parted to low lights. An auctioneer was offering up lots from the destitute opera house. Robert, covered in elaborate make up and sitting in an old-fashioned wheel chair (old enough to have belonged to Taylor Allderdice himself), was brought on. I listened as the man auctioned off the little monkey music box.

Colby cleared his voice and sang softly, echoing the old man’s thoughts over the speakers.  _“A collector’s piece indeed. Every detail exactly as she said. She often spoke of you, my friend; your velvet lining, and your figurine of lead… Will you still play when all the rest of us are dead?”_

We began clutching each other’s hands as lot 666 was brought up. The chandelier in pieces from the ‘Phantom incident’ many years before was laying on the stage.

“Perhaps we can frighten away the ghosts of many years ago with a little… illumination.” The auctioneer nodded to someone unseen.

Lux flipped a switch in the balcony. The orchestra began again as the lights became blazing bright and an amazing contraption that Billy and Mayu had built lifted the chandelier up above the room and all the way to the ceiling. Despite the slightly nervous bundles in my stomach, I giggled, thinking of the cherry picker the stage crew had to use to attach the contraption to the ceiling. The auditorium lit up like the Fourth of July as the sets began to change and a shinning beautiful gold set for Hannibal took its place. A small group of ballerinas, including me, began our dance warm ups on one side; Allison, in an insanely big and complex corset dress, began singing operatically and intentionally poorly. 

Eric as Andre and Jake as Firmin were lead on to investigate the production as the new owners of the opera house. They introduced themselves and their further observed.

Allison was introduced to Eric and Jake; she threw a little hissy fit, and was tranquilized when they offered to hear her sing. Two lines into the song, Billy threw a pulley backstage and sent a light set down crashing onto Allison.

_“He’s here, the Phantom of the Opera!”_  several ballerinas sang.

This sent Allison into a total tizzy and she threw a complete fit before storming out. Stephie came on again and presented an envelope to Eric and Jake, informing them about their true boss, the Phantom. They ignored her as crazy and continued arguing about what they were going to do about their lead soprano walking off. 

Stephie finally cut them off. “Christine Daaé could sing it for you,” she said, stepping between them. The stage stopped and stared. “Let her sing for you. She has been well-taught.”

The producers argued off to the side until I began to sing, quietly at first, then louder.

_“Think of me, think of me fondly when we’ve said goodbye,”_  I sang.  _“Remember me once in a while; please promise me you’ll try. When you find that once again you long to take your heart back and be free. If you ever find a moment, spare a thought for me.”_

The stage began moving as a crescendo began. The cast moved almost all the way off stage, hiding as if they were waiting for their cues. As the costumers crossed the stage, they added a larger, fuller dress that zippered up over my original and a crown on my head. Colby had made his way to the makeshift catwalk above the pulley system and into the makeshift patron box we had created to be Box 5. Meanwhile, I knew Duncan had found his way to the other side of the catwalk, which we had created a creepy upper system to; now, when he walked up there, Duncan seemed to be creeping around the most unknown parts of the opera house.

I turned back to the audience, now part of the opera for real. “We never said our love was evergreen, or as unchanging as the sea. But if you can still remember, stop and think of me.

_“Think of all the things we’ve shared and seen; don’t think about the way things might have been.”_

I smiled charmingly up to where Mayu and Lux would be watching and sang sadly.  _“Think of me; think of me waking silent and resigned. Imagine me trying too hard to put you from my mind. Recall those days; look back on all those times, think of the things we’ll never do. There will never be a day when I won’t think of you!”_

I stood back as the ballerinas did their little thing across the stage while Colby sang from his box. _“Can it be?”_  he sang quietly.  _“Can it be Christine? Bravo!”_  He stood up and clapped. “ _Long ago; it seems so long ago, how young and innocent we were. She may not remember me, but I remember-“_

“ _Flowers fade, the fruits of summer fade; they have their seasons, so do we,”_  I sang, the dancers leaving the stage. “ _But please promise me that sometimes you will think…”_

I did some vocal runs, ending loud and clear to thunderous applause. I cleared the stage with everyone and jumped into Colby’s waiting hug.

“We did it,” I said with a combination of mouthing the words and American Sign Language (a language I had learned just for using backstage). In case our mics were still on, it was almost completely silent in the wings. I shrugged on a dressing gown over my dress as I did so, hurrying as the scene changed.

“I know!” He signed. “You were amazing!”

“That down, two hours to go,” I signed back with a silent nervous giggle. The set change was complete, and I was due back. “See you on stage!”

 

Stephie was onstage, near the dressing room, chiding the ballerinas.

_“Yes, you did well; he will be pleased. And you! You were a disgrace tonight! Such ronds de jambs! Such temps de cuisse! Here- we rehearse. Now.”_

I went on to sit in my dressing room, and I heard Duncan’s voice echo Megan’s as she came looking for me.

_“Brava! Brava! Bravissima!”_

_“Christine?”_  she sang lightly.  _“Christine?_

_“Christine…”_  Duncan’s deep voice echoed through the room.

Megan walked into my room then, giddy and giggly.  _“Where in the world have you been hiding? Really, you were perfect!”_  She smiled as I sat.  _“I only wish I knew your secret! Who is this new tutor?”_

I paused for a second, and then whispered to her.  _“Meg, when your mother brought me here to live, whenever I’d come down alone to light a candle for my father, a voice from above. And in my dreams. He was always there. You see, when my father lay dying, he told me I would be protected by an angel.”_  I smiled at her and took her hands.  _“An angel of music.”_

She looked down, considering for a minute. “Christine,” she said slowly, “do you believe… do you think the spirit of your father is coaching you?”

“Who else, Meg? Who?”

She looked at me as if I was crazy.

_“Father once spoke of an angel; I used to dream he’d appear. Now as I sing, I can sense him, and I know he’s here! Here, in this room, he calls me softly; somewhere inside, hiding. Somehow I know he’s always with me; he the unseen genius!”_

Megan began looking worried; pulling me on my feet so that she could look in my eyes.  _“Christine, you must have been dreaming; stories like this can’t come true. Christine, you’re talking in riddles, and it’s not like you!”_

But I was hearing none of it.  _“Angel of Music, guide and guardian! Grant to me your glory.”_

_“Who is this angel, this-“_

_“Angel of Music, hide no longer,”_  we sang together,  _“secret and strange angel.”_

_“He’s with me even now-“_

_“Your hands are cold!”_

_“All around me-“_

_“Your face, Christine; its white!”_

_“It frightens me-“_

_“Don’t be frightened…”_

Stephie came in and scolded Megan for neglecting her practice; they left, leaving me alone with my thoughts, but it was only a second before Colby joined me, telling me who he was with a story of a scarf he’d fished out of the river for me years before. We laughed over it.

_“Little Lotte let her mind wonder,”_  he sang,  _“Little Lotte thought, ‘Am I fonder of dolls? Or of riddles or frocks?”_

“You remember that too!” I said, smiling 

_“Or of chocolates?”_

_“Those picnics in the attic?”_

We laughed and talked, and he went to get his horses to whisk us away to eat. Before I could leave, though, I heard Duncan’s voice from nowhere.

_“Insolent boy, this slave of fashion, basking your glory!”_  His voice boomed over the sound systems, powerful and terrifying.  _“Insolent fool, this brave young suitor, sharing in my triumph!”_

I looked around for the voice I knew I wouldn’t find.  _“Angel I hear you; speak, I listen. Stay by my side; guide me. Angel, my soul was weak, forgive me. Enter at last, master.”_

His voice softened. “ _Flattering child, you shall’nt know me; see why in shadow I hide. Look at your face in the mirror; I am there inside!”_

I turned to see him standing in the full-length mirror in the dressing room, his cape touching the ground and his hand slowly rising to take mine.

_“Angel of Music, guide and guardian! Grant to me your glory! Angel of Music, hide no longer, come to me strange angel!”_

He began using what was by far the creepiest voice I had ever heard, creating a trance-like sound that pulled everyone who heard it in.  _“I am your Angel of Music… Come to the Angel of Music…”_

Colby could be heard on the other side of the freestanding door, yelling for me: “ _Whose is that voice? Who is that in there!”_

But Duncan’s deep enticing voice was no match for the yells. “ _I am your Angel of Music… Come to the Angel of Music…”_

The chords of the famous song began with thunderous applause. Duncan and I ran backstage as fast as we could to find the gondola.

“You’re doing amazingly!” I signed simply to him. “We’re blowing them away!” I stopped to pick my skirt up to avoid snagging it on the moving scenery that was flying past the body doubles, whom were being used to make it seem as though we were traveling though the underground tunnels.

He stared at me as he climbed behind me in the gondola. “I have no idea what you’re saying!” he whispered, covering his mic as best as he could. “I don’t know sign language! Why do you?”

Before I could answer, we were onstage, singing the title song. Most surprisingly, nothing went wrong, despite the fact it was almost predestined for disaster. The smoke made it only slightly difficult to reach the E over high E, which had taken me months of practice to reach.

As soon as that was over, poor Duncan had to launch right into the show’s second most famous song. He stood there; staring at me, catching his breath for a moment before gesturing to the underground world Mayu and Billy had created.

_“I have brought you to the seat of sweet music’s throne; to this kingdom where all must pay homage to music… music…”_  He took a great gasping breath, and I began to hope that he didn’t pass out; which, while it would have been funny, would have been a complete disaster.  _“You have come here for one purpose and one alone: since the moment I first heard you sing, I have needed you with me, to serve me to sing for my music…”_  Another great breath.  _“My music…”_

He launched into the song, and I picked this most inopportune time to think back to the first time I’d ever actually gotten along with him. We were backstage, sitting at the piano, and he had been butchering this exact song.

_“Night time sharpens, heightens each sensation. Darkness stirs and wakes imagination. Silently the senses abandon their defenses…”_

But that had been before. That had been what seemed like years ago. He flew through the song effortlessly, save for the completely minor breathing problems that the smoke machines were causing for all of us. He led me through the incredible world he had created without much more than his voice; I had never really stopped to think about it before, but he wasn’t just good: he was damn good.

_“Slowly, gently, night unfurls its splendor. Grasp it; sense it, tremulous and tender. Turn your face away from the garish light of day; turn your thoughts away from cold unfeeling light, and listen to the music of the night._

_“Close your eyes and surrender to your darkest dreams; purge all thoughts of the life you knew before! Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar: and you’ll live as you’ve never lived before.”_

He walked over to me and very carefully took my hand; delicately, as if it would either break or, barring that, punch him in the face.  _“Softly, deftly, music shall caress you. Hear it, feel it, secretly possess you. Open up your mind; let your fantasies unwind in this darkness that_ _you know you cannot fight. The darkness of the music of the night.”_

_“Let your mind start a journey to a strange new world, leave all thoughts of the life you knew before! Let your soul take you where you long to be!”_  The note resonated deep in his chest, and then hung in the air for a second of silence. “ _Only then can you belong to me._

“ _Floating, falling, sweet intoxication. Touch me, trust me, savor each sensation.”_  As he ran his hands down my back and around my waist, I had to struggle not to give in to old urges and hit him- old habits and all.  _“Let the dream begin, let your darker side give in to the power of the music that I write: The power of the music of the night!”_

He finally took me over to a curtain and showed me a mannequin of myself in a wedding dress. I ‘passed out’ into his arms. He was surprisingly strong, and carried me across the stage, past the gondola to where a bed had been rolled out. He set me down and pushed the hair out of my face.

_“You alone can make my song take flight,”_  he nearly whispered.  _“Help me make the music of… the… night…”_

I was getting changed backstage with Duncan for a few minutes while the rest of the cast did their traditional cast pump-up, relaxing in the all too short break the intermission provided.

“I don’t know if I can do this for another night,” I said as I pulled my brightly colored masquerade gown. “Let alone another three.”

He laughed. “Try getting though the first one, then make that decision.”

I threw down the strings of my hair bow, which was refusing to make a knot behind my head. “I give up; tie this for me while I get my shoes on.”

He obliged as I slipped the blue suede ballet shoes on- yes, I had to wear and make blue suede ballet shoes.

“I feel like Elvis wrote about me.”

Duncan laughed. “I’m pretty sure he did.” He did me the favor of zippering the rest of the dress that I couldn’t reach. “But its okay, you’re adorable.”

I pirouetted once before I led him down the hallway. “Thank you!” I heard the first chimes signifying five minutes until the second act. “We have a few minutes.”

He went to sit down, but I stopped him for several reasons. “First of all, don’t even consider sitting on this narsty ground wearing that cape. It took me forever and a fortune to make.”

“Narsty?”

I ignored him. “Second… thank you.”

He looked confused. “For what? Not sitting?”

“No, for being my best friend no matter how hard I tried to make you my enemy.” I smiled. “I would have missed out on a lot of good things if it wasn’t for you. I owe you pretty big, I guess.” I shook my head. “Who would have thought, after seeing us meet in that cardio room, that we would end up here.”

He laughed. “Who indeed.” There was a mischievous smile on his face.

“What?”

“I desire you in friendship, and I will one way or other make you amends.”

I smiled. “Antonio, from The Merry Wives of Windsor.”

“Correct.”

“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten to their end.”

“Well now that’s just depressing.”

I laughed quietly. “Thank you, Duncan, for everything.” I felt myself getting a little teary. “I guess the end of this is just coming so fast, and I’m so not ready for it.”

He hugged me. “Please don’t cry, you’ll ruin your make up, and the Entr’acte is about to start.” He kissed my forehead. “Cass, every ending is just a new beginning.”

I took a breath to steady myself. “I know. But I just want you to know that you’re my best friend.” I smiled up at him, kissed him once on the cheek, and started through the door to the wings.

“Seriously?” I heard him ask. “Now that I’m over her, she kisses me?”

 

The final moments of the show were by far the most intense.

After we finished ‘The Point of No Return’, Duncan’s mask had been ripped off by yours truly, and he was dragging me though the tunnels, running from the mob and the opera house fire. I did an amazingly fast quick change from my ‘No Return’ dress to a full out wedding dress that had been on a mannequin not long before.

I stormed onstage. _“Have you gorged yourself at last in your lust for blood?”_

Duncan said nothing, only stared at me.

_“Am I now to be prey to your lust for flesh?”_

He laughed a little as he crossed to me. “ _That fate which condemns me to wallow in blood has also denied me the joys of the flesh.”_  He went to run a hand across my face, but I turned away and he got angry. “This face the infection which poisons our love?” Now it was his turn to face away from me, singing to the darkness.  _“This face which earned a mother’s fear and loathing. A_  mask  _my first unfeeling scrap of clothing.”_  He changed his mind and turned back to stand his ground. _“Pity comes too late, turn around and face your fate. An eternity of this!”_  he forced me to face him,  _“before your eyes…”_

I looked at him for a long second before cupping his face in my hand. “ _This haunted face holds no horror for me now.”_  I gave him back the veil for the dress. “ _It’s in your soul that the true distortion lies.”_

Footsteps from the other side of the stage. We turned to see Colby stumbling onstage, separated from us by a metal grate. Duncan laughed.

_“Wait! I think, my dear, we have a guest! Sir, this is indeed an unparalleled delight!_ ” He walked over, laughing.  _“I had rather hoped that you would come. And now my wish comes true; you have truly made my night!”_

Colby reached through the grate.  _“Free her! Do what you like, only free her! Have you no pity?”_

_“Your lover makes a passionate plea,”_  Duncan laughed at me.

_“Please, Raoul, it’s useless,”_  I almost whispered.

_“I love her!”_  Colby almost screamed. _“Does that mean nothing? I love her! Show some compassion!”_

_“The world showed no compassion to me!”_  Duncan practically spat at him.

_“Christine, Christine. Let me see her!”_

_“Be my guest. Sir.”_  The ‘sir’ was tacked on in a wonderfully mocking way.

With a pull of the pulleys from Billy, the grate rose and Colby stumbled into the lair. Duncan sauntered over to meet him.  _“Monsieur I bid you welcome! Did you think that I would harm her?”_  A cruel laugh. _“Why would I make her pay for the sins which are yours!”_

A noose dropped from the ceiling, the Phantom’s ‘magical lasso’, and with a debilitating punch to Colby, Duncan began to tie him to the grate and fit the noose around his neck. He started mocking Colby, and I could only stay nearby and watch.

_“Order your fine horses now! Raise up your hand to the level of your eyes! Nothing can save you now; except, perhaps, Christine!”_  He turned on me, more yelling than singing.  _“Start a new life with me; buy his freedom with your love! Refuse me and you send your lover to his death! THIS is the choice; THIS is the point of no return!”_

There was a lull in the music to give me time to gather my thoughts. Finally, I spoke again:

_“The tears I might have shed for your dark fate grow cold and turn to tears of hate!”_

Colby looked at me so incredibly sorrowfully that I nearly collapsed on the spot and cried.  _“Christine, forgive me; please forgive me. I did it all for you, and all for nothing!”_

Duncan and I overlapped as we sang.  _“Farewell, my fallen idol and false friend! We had such hopes, and now those hopes are shattered!”_  I sang as he sang over me:  _“One by one, I’ve watched illusions shattered. Past all cries of hope for help!_

_“No point in fighting!”_

_“For either way you choose, he has to win!”_  Colby yelled to me.

Duncan pulled the rope tighter. _“So do you end your days with me, or do you send him to his grave?”_

_“Why make her lie to you to save me?”_  The music started a grand crescendo.  _“For pity’s sake, Christine! Don’t throw your life away for my sake!”_

I fell on the stage and started crying. “ _Angel of Music, why this torment? When will you see reason?”_

Duncan yelled at me. _“His life is now the prize which you must earn!”_

And Colby visibly gave up.  _“I fought so hard to free you._

_“You’ve passed the point of no… return…”_

_“Angel of Music,”_  I sang softly, looking up at him, _“you deceived me.”_  I stood up so that I was even with him, looking him in the eyes.  _“I gave my mind blindly.”_

_“You try my patience!”_  He growled. “ _Make your choice!”_

I looked between the two of them; the world had vanished, and the three of us were the only ones who remained. After a long minute, I turned back to Duncan.

_“Pitiful creature of darkness,”_  I whispered, holding his face, _“what kind of life have you known? God give me courage to show you: you are you not alone!”_  And with that, I kissed him. The music swelled; I could feel him smile and swore he was going to chuckle. After all our fighting, all our torment, he had gotten me to kiss him. I shoved the thought from my head before I myself started laughing.

From offstage, we heard the rest of the cast singing. _“Track down this murderer, he must be found! Hunt down this animal who runs to ground! Too long he’s preyed on us, but now we know: the Phantom of the Opera is there, deep down below!”_

Duncan forced himself away from me and sang to the ground, standing near his discarded mask.  _“Take him- forget me. Forget all you’ve seen. Go now; don’t let them find you!”_

The chorus got louder as I ran over and untied Colby from the grate.

_“Take the boat; swear to me never to tell the secret you know of the Angel in hell!”_

And still louder.

_“Go NOW!”_  He yelled.  _“Go now and leave me!”_

The music stopped for a minute as he collapsed on the stage. Colby was free and pulling me to come along with him before the mob found us. I almost did, but Duncan began singing again, quietly, whispering and crying at the same time.

_“Masquerade…”_  he sang to the mask, as a small music box with a Persian monkey on it began tinkering out the melody.  _“Paper faces on parade… Masquerade… hide your face so the world will never find you…”_

I went up behind him and put my hand on his shoulder. He covered it with his own.

Without looking at me, he sang again.  _“Christine, I love… you…”_

Colby was behind me and took my other hand, gently pulling me away. With one look at Duncan, I followed him, reluctantly walking at first, before quickly running behind Colby. He helped me into the gondola, and soon we were gone.

We started singing once offstage, a memory that echoed though the Phantom’s mind.

_“Say you’ll share with me one love, one lifetime,”_  I sang.

_“Say the word and I will follow you,”_  Colby sang back.

We sang together.  _“Share each day with me, each night, each morning…”_

Duncan sang quietly again.  _“You alone can make my song take flight…”_  He stood up and cried loudly. “ _It’s over now, the Music of the Night!”_

The music crashed as he ran off opposite of us. The mob came in; each looking around in amazement that such a place existed. Then, as the final notes began to slowly ring, Megan picked up a discarded mask, holding it for all to see. The stage lights darkened. The specials darkened. And Megan’s spotlight grew smaller and smaller, until all that anyone could see was the single white mask in her hand. And finally, as the final notes grew quieter and quieter, the light vanished and the stage was thrown into darkness.

The audience was thrown into madness. I could hear them as Colby, Duncan and I met backstage behind the middle double doors, squeezing each other’s hands as we lined up with one of them on each of my sides. Duncan quickly reattached one of the extra masks we had as Colby and I excitedly exchanged signs. The actors cleared the stage and the orchestra began again. Lights up. The entire chorus paraded on stage to thunderous applause. They were followed by Joseph Buquet, Carlotta and Piangi, who took their bows and made way for Andre and Firmin. 

Madame Giry and Meg were next, both of whom got a booming ovation.  

The double doors opened and the three of us paraded up the center of the stage to the greatest ovation yet. Had there not already been a standing ovation, it would have become one. We bowed as a trio. Colby took his bow and laughed at several wolf whistles. Duncan made a deep bow, causing applause that nearly blew out my ears.

Finally, I looked up into the spotlight where I knew my Lux and Mayu were standing. I bowed so that I was almost on the ground, unable to stop smiling as the audience roared. I looked at Colby and took his hand, squeezing our small cuts together. I smiled at Duncan and did the same, and we did a last group bow.

Soon everyone was lined up with us. I looked up and down the line, seeing all the friends I had spent four years living with. We bowed together, miraculously at the same time, avoiding doing the Wave, which we had so often done. We clapped and cheered up to the tech booth, then down to the orchestra, before lining up one more time and bowed, this time laughing as we did a successful wave.

The lights dimmed. 

The music faded. 

The curtains closed.


	8. Epilogue

Let me be frank with you:

Every high school is thought to be hell to those who inhabit it. They are correct.

Taylor Allderdice was no exception. 

The ancient building was falling apart the last time I saw it. The pool was essentially filled with grease. Bugs and weave could be found constantly sticking to your shoes in the hallways. Part of the auditorium ceiling had caved in and, rather than re-plastered, was repainted. The tear in the red main stage curtain was safety pinned and left to dry rot. Some of the teachers were handpicked by the devil. Some of the classes were, for lack of a more descriptive and less vulgar term, shit.

And I, Cassandra Hathaway, survived.

After the Phantom of the Opera, we went on to be nominated for and win Best Musical in Budget Level II, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Crew, Best Set Design, and Best Student Light Design at the Pittsburgh Gene Kelly Awards; we were nominated for Best Student Orchestra, Best Choreography, Best Direction, and Best Ensemble. The greatest picture I’ve ever seen was taken backstage that night, featuring me, Duncan, Colby, Lux, and Mayu, standing in the wings, holding our Kelly Awards, dressed to the nines, and smiling like it was going out of style.

The Taylor Allderdice High School Class of 2010 graduated June 20th of that year on the floor of the Mellon Arena, which has since been demolished. Most people in that class were essentially sentenced to attend CCAC, the Community College of Allegheny County, or Clown College, as my dad likes to call it. Your beloved Drama Queen did not.

I went on to attend Carnegie Mellon University, which despite its proximity to home, was one of the best choices I’ve ever made. I majored in musical theatre, with a costume double major and minor degree in production and directing- you know, as a fall back. I started by getting small roles in major films filming nearby, and eventually got my Broadway break. I now live in a beautiful Manhattan loft with a chinchilla, internet access, and whoever decides they want to crash on my couch.

Lux became an English Lit. major, journalism minor at Iowa, on the Dean’s List, and found job offers in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and with CNN as a foreign correspondent in Europe. She did some over-seas coverage for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette her junior year of college and gets regular offers from the most well known papers in the country. Her resume continues to grow exponentially and impressively, although she never fails to remember the little people from home that spent their years driving her crazy.

Mayu is still ‘the random one’. She went to MIT after her year in Japan and is insanely amazing at her major of computer graphic design. Several companies, including EA Games and Nintendo, have hired her for many projects, and she’s assisted in producing some of the most legendary games to come out of either company. Her place of residence is currently my couch, and she insists that my chinchilla likes her better because she is willing to share her snacks. On a side note, my chinchilla is very fat now.

Colby got an education to be a lawyer, much to all of our surprise. He studied at Princeton, passed his classes, and was remarkably good on the lacrosse team. He had job offers all across the US, but now lives in Florida, a mile from the beach. It has become a summer tradition to raid his house for a week, an event we don’t think he minds too much.

Duncan, like me, began as a theatre major, although he was at the not-so-famous Edinboro University, about two hours north of Pittsburgh. He tells me we got the exact same quality of education, except his was a lot quieter with a much more snowy campus. As a surprise, he changed his major to education, saying he thinks it’s more his kind of thing. Also surprising was his reluctance to return to Pittsburgh, now convinced it’s too loud and crowded compared to the middle of Erie County. Most surprising of all, he found the love of his life, Emily, sitting outside his dorm reading one day, and married her not long after graduation. As a joke, he asked me to be his best man; he was pretty surprised when I accepted, and stood there with him on his wedding day, tux and all. But it makes sense; I am his best friend (not counting his wife).

I walked into senior year expecting it to be nothing spectacular; don’t we all? Little did any of us know that those 180 days of learning were actually an education. Sure, 20 years down the road, I may forget what my lines were, where my class was, the names of the songs we sang, the places we went, some names of some people, how many hours were put into costumes, what little mistakes were made every night, or what was done perfectly.

But what matters is that it all led to me, standing on a bright stage, dressed in a spectacular gown made by myself, a thousand faces in the audience watching me while hundreds of thousands more watched at home, a small gold trophy in my hands with the words “American Theatre Wing Tony Award” on a small gold plaque, my friends cheering in the balcony while I got to thank them each by name. Five solid years of nominations had led to me finally winning the Tony for Best Actress. And in a quiet moment that I stood there, and I was 18 again, at the first cast meeting of the year, having just rocked out to “La Vie Boheme”, happy to just be where I was.

Don’t think I let it go to my head, though. As I walked away, I could hear Mayu, Lux, Colby, and Duncan yell as loud as they could:

“Drama Queen!”

And they were, after all, right.


	9. Drama Queen: The Playlist

**  
**For each chapter, follow along with all the songs!

**ACT I: I CAN’T HELP SINGING**

> [What Do You Do With a BA in English?](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUAvfCU8rzA) || [Keys](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnXnOgKwM0s&list=PL91E9E6DA2459D12F&index=3) || [When You’re Home](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjScaRM2aCg) || [La Vie Boheme A](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5yK-3iUGQE) & [B](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QokRhquEOmo) || [The Music and the Mirror](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh5wwfs0xKo) || [Elephant Love Medley](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Mlig-z9OJg)

**ACT II: GHOST- THE MUSICAL**

> [Past the Point of No Return](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-ZAgfR_Ck0) || [All I Ask of You](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkl09TUOoL4) || [The Phantom of the Opera](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-ZAgfR_Ck0)

**ACT III: YOUR OWN THING**

> [I Remember](http://www.ronimeron.com/) || [A Thousand Miles](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwkej79U3ek) || [Singin in the Rain](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1ZYhVpdXbQ) || [White Houses](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM3fEJyPrrg)

**ACT IV: A HATFUL OF SNOW**

> [Hey, Soul Sister](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVpv8-5XWOI) || [If Tomorrow Wasn’t Such A Long Time](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N9Kg6DqGfc) || [The Ashoken Farewell](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hy_miqNfljY) || [My Junk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SuNIiPXEM8) || [Masquerade](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxKmtXEVVPM)

**ACT V: TIME HAS FLOWN**

> [Et Je Danse](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-o-QLUhDQ) || [Chu Chu Lovely Muni Muni Mura Mura Purin Purin Boron Nururu Rerorero](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhcWm4RxgwM) || [Fireflies](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psuRGfAaju4) || [All I Ask of You (Reprise)](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkl09TUOoL4) || [96000](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJoePhmJBAc)

**ACT IV: THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA**

> [Think of Me](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM0a9REvLdI) || [Angel of Music](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS0MqScVDMM) || [The Music of the Night](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imv-7F8zHy4) || [Down Once More/Track Down This Murderer](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MomeCr9LUs)


End file.
